Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad: Oct. 19 The Washington Post on the West rebuilding Ukraine Beyond Ukraine’s stunning recent battlefield successes, eight months of war have rendered the country a physical, financial and economic basket case. Millions of refugees have fled, the country’s gross domestic product has shrunk by about one-third, and the government, its budget depleted by the war, runs monthly deficits of $4 billion or more – mainly financed by Western grants, a lifeline for teachers, retirees living on pensions and millions of others. Even if Russia were to withdraw now, Ukraine would remain enfeebled for years. Before Russian President Vladimir Putin rained missiles on Ukrainian power plants and other facilities this month, the cost of repairing damage to the country’s critical infrastructure had already been estimated at nearly $200 billion, according to a study by the Kyiv School of Economics. And that is just a fraction of the overall wreckage wrought by Moscow’s indiscriminate attacks. Rebuilding the country, among Europe’s biggest by population and area, will be a generational undertaking. ‘œIt’s not every day that you rebuild a whole country,’� said Vlad Rashkovan, a former deputy governor of the Ukrainian central bank who now represents the country on the International Monetary Fund’s executive board. One question – the $1 trillion question, in the estimate of some economists – is who will pay for it. The United States and Europe, along with international banks and development institutions, must take leading and shared roles. For Ukraine to succeed, it must also be reformed and broadly reinvented as a viable candidate for admission into the European Union, which can wield the leverage to effect those reforms. That means the reconstruction of Ukraine will depend on more than cash and concrete, although heroic quantities of both are needed. Ultimately its fate will turn on a transformation of mind-set and governance in a nation notorious for oligarchs and endemic corruption. Even before the shooting stops, the country must launch a durable, ironclad, transparent project to transform ministries, markets, courts, businesses and institutions, raising them to Western democratic and free-market standards. Easier said than done, of course. Prewar Ukraine aspired to join the E.U., in the sense that a C student aspires to admission to the Ivy League. Transparency International ranks it as Europe’s third-most-corrupt country, behind only Russia and Azerbaijan. When a top advocate for reform in Ukraine was asked recently how corruption was faring in the country after months of war, he responded dryly: ‘œThe good thing is, there’s no money.’� Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, rightly lionized as an inspirational wartime leader, was ineffective at best during his first three years in office in rolling back graft, the very promise that got him elected in 2019. His second prime minister, dismissed in 2020, said Mr. Zelensky fired him because the government’s own anti-corruption efforts were threatening wealthy power brokers close to the president. Hundreds of millions of dollars in government funds and foreign aid have been siphoned off in recent years by oligarchs, who have used Ukraine’s several thousand state-run companies as ATMs, with the government’s connivance. Reforms need to start even as rebuilding and humanitarian efforts accelerate in shattered towns and cities from which Russian troops have withdrawn. They are key not only to launch Ukraine on what will be a long path toward E.U. membership – an exceptionally rigorous process – but also to signal to Western governments and multilateral institutions that their aid dollars will not be leached away by oligarchs and kleptocrats.