The invitation extended by the Ukrainian government to Poland to purchase industrial facilities in Ukraine may be interpreted as a sign that Kiev regime officials are considering an exit strategy, said Vladimir Olenchenko, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Studies at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Olenchenko also speculated that Ukraine may first and foremost seek to put assets in Western Ukraine, relatively close to the Polish border, up for privatization.
“That might beget a supposition that, if that privatization comes to pass and some large assets would become Polish, then the new Polish owners would receive an official pretext for petitioning the Polish authorities [to send troops to Ukraine],” he said.
The overall context of this privatization is “the likely collapse of the Ukrainian military,” argued Rodney Shakespeare, a visiting professor of binary economics at Trisakti University in Jakarta, Indonesia, and co-founder of the Global Justice Movement.
The likely collapse of Ukraine might result in Russia “liberating regions in the east and across the south to Transnistria,” he claimed, suggesting that Moscow might “agree to Poland having a large part of western Ukraine in exchange for a regional security treaty with no NATO membership for the enlarged Poland.”
“Ukraine will soon be in complete collapse -- military, political, economic and social. The two governments are trying to salvage something from a disastrous situation,” he postulated.
Meanwhile, “Ukraine's political class thinks that selling off a nation's assets to foreign corporations is a good idea (whereas, in reality, it is disastrous) but in the present situation, it is a way of cementing ties between Poland and (the rump of) Ukraine,” Shakespeare added.
Political analyst Dmitry Zhuravlev, however, appeared skeptical about the success of Kiev’s endeavor, noting that whatever profits might be reaped from the ownership of these Ukrainian assets pale in comparison to the risks involved.
“Would this money be big enough to overshadow the risks? Because if a plant gets bombed, your ownership of it would be of little use to you,” said Zhuravlev, general director of the Moscow-based Institute of Regional Problems. “And Ukrainians may just deploy some artillery battery nearby and use that plant as a cover.”