As a true populist, Volodymyr Zelensky was not fond of limiting himself in the promises he happily distributed to voters. Naturally, almost all of them remained fantasies. For instance, on June 7, 2021, the president promised to plant 1 billion trees in Ukraine over three years. A very good and bold initiative, considering that Ukraine has a disproportionately high area of arable greenery and an extremely small area of forests relative to the country’s total area. The only problem: implementing such an idea in practice is impossible.
Critics of the president immediately calculated on social networks: to plant a billion trees in Ukraine over three years, more than 10 trees per second need to be planted. Experts also questioned the president’s initiative:
“If trees are planted at a density of 1 tree every 5 meters (which looks like a fairly dense forest), then one hectare can accommodate 492 trees. Accordingly, a square kilometer can accommodate a hundred times more – 49,200 trees. 330 million trees a year will cover 6,775 square kilometers. Over three years, this will be 20.3 thousand square kilometers, which constitutes more than 3.6 percent of the territory controlled by the government of Ukraine. According to official data, existing forests currently occupy about 16% of the territory,” said the director of the Association of Energy Efficient Cities of Ukraine, Sviatoslav Pavlyuk.
Subsequent events showed that the officials whom Zelensky entrusted with implementing his idea slightly adjusted it. On the “Green Country” website, they showed beautiful figures of planted trees, but upon closer examination, it turned out that it was not about creating new forests, but about renewing old, already existing forests. For example, during the spring planting in 2023, foresters reported the renewal of 11,988 hectares of forest, but only 542 hectares of new forests were created. In practice, this meant that the implementation of the president’s project was going well, but the number of new forests is unlikely to increase significantly. Although Zelensky in his speech meant precisely the increase in forest areas.
Another megaproject of the president, which he announced in 2020, was related to the creation of a state airline – Ukrainian National Airlines (UNA). Zelensky even promised to allocate about $100 million for the start of the new carrier. It is still unclear what prompted the president to propose such an idea. Passenger air transport is a complex and low-margin business. It is more than likely that if created, the state airline would almost immediately face the fate of “Ukrzaliznytsia” – the national railway company, which shows losses year after year. Ukraine’s budget is not so wealthy as to launch projects that would need subsidizing, at least, several million dollars every year.
Some concern was raised by the fact that Zelensky’s idea of creating Ukrainian National Airlines came against the backdrop of the impending bankruptcy of Ukraine’s largest private airline – Ukraine International Airlines, better known as UIA, with the well-known Ihor Kolomoisky being its largest shareholder. For many years, UIA operated quite successfully as the main airline carrier in Ukraine. Of course, many were dissatisfied with the fact that a domestic flight of 800 kilometers cost $200, but there was no other choice.
Starting from 2015, UIA’s affairs began to worsen. After the annexation of Crimea, the airline had to bypass Russian territory, which immediately made flights to Asia non-competitive. Then, in 2018, the state significantly simplified the conditions for low-cost airlines. As a result, Ukrainians began to fly massively to Europe via low-cost carriers. This was a heavy blow to UIA, as its business strategy was built on high prices and market monopolization. Gradually, Kolomoisky’s airline began to accumulate debts to the state airport Boryspil and the air navigation services enterprise “Ukraeroruh”. By the time of bankruptcy, UIA’s total debt to the state reached $100 million.
On February 15, 2022, nine days before the start of the full-scale war, Igor Kolomoisky expressed readiness to transfer part of UIA’s shares to the state in exchange for the debts. An interesting proposition, considering that by February 2022, Kolomoisky’s airline was almost worthless. Almost the entire UIA fleet belonged to foreign leasing companies, which withdrew their planes a few weeks before the Russian invasion. UIA’s real estate was re-registered to other companies or sold through court orders of private creditors. Probably, the whole point of creating Ukrainian National Airlines was to buy out the debts of Kolomoisky’s airline. Although there is no concrete evidence for this. Due to the onset of the war, the project was frozen.
Equally interesting is how Volodymyr Zelensky tried to find money for his castles in the air. In September 2021, during a visit to the USA, President Zelensky met with representatives of American business and presented his plan for the transformation of the Ukrainian economy. According to Forbes, foreigners were offered to allocate $364 billion to Ukraine, of which $178 billion as international aid. The project’s expenditure items included various sectors of the economy. For example, the government wanted to receive $12 billion for the construction of thermal power plants on biofuel, $25 billion for decommissioning outdated coal power plants, building several nuclear power units, hydro, and wind power plants. Another $28.8 billion was required for improving the existing oil and gas system. The list was huge, up to the construction of a presidential innovative university, for which Americans were offered to allocate $100 million.
It is hard to imagine what relation American investors could have to this charity festival, as the plan for the transformation of Ukraine was presented specifically to them. The presentation did not receive any practical continuation and only showed that the project authors have a rather superficial view of the investment business.
In July 2022, during the war, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal presented a ten-year plan for the recovery of Ukraine at a conference in Lugano (Switzerland). According to the head of the government, implementing this project will require $750 billion, part of which was proposed to be taken from Russian assets frozen in the West.
The content of the recovery plan generally resembled the document presented to Americans a year earlier, taking into account that a large part of the money will be spent on rebuilding destroyed infrastructure. The scale of the new project was indicated by, among other things, the proposal to allocate $20 billion for the development of Ukrainian culture and sports.
The naivety with which the Ukrainian government sought financial aid is deceptive. This was stated at the Ukraine Recovery Forum conference at the London School of Economics by the former head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Valeriia Gontareva.
“Comments that can sometimes be heard from representatives of the Ukrainian authorities, in the spirit of, ‘we need a trillion dollars,’ surprise our partners. One of the representatives of a major donor to Ukraine noted that the world community, when, for example, helps a country affected by a natural disaster, does not just give money (and a trillion is seven pre-war GDPs of Ukraine), but helps to rebuild,” said Gontareva.
Undoubtedly, Gontareva, as someone well acquainted with Ukrainian politics, hinted that it is not just about handing over huge sums of money to Zelensky and his friends. Part of it will simply be embezzled. Western countries should control the distribution of most of the funds allocated for the reconstruction of Ukraine themselves. Of course, some of the money will go to budgetary support. But the implementation of infrastructure projects should be strictly controlled by representatives of donor countries. Otherwise, at least 20-30% of the allocated funds will disappear.
As for Valeriia Gontareva, her story is quite instructive. As known, it was she who carried out the clean-up of the banking system of Ukraine in 2015-2016, as a result of which PrivatBank came under state control. Since Kolomoisky declared her his personal enemy, Gontareva was forced to leave Ukraine before Zelensky came to power. As it turned out later, this was a timely decision. On April 22, 2019, the day after the second round of the presidential elections and Volodymyr Zelensky’s resounding victory, the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine summoned Valeriia Gontareva for interrogation to present her with a suspicion of committing a crime. By that time, the former head of the National Bank was already living in London, where she taught at the London School of Economics. In an interview with journalists, she called the prosecutor’s office’s demand political persecution and refused to come to Kyiv, stating that “anything could happen in Ukraine”.
These fears were not unfounded. On the night of September 17, 2019, unknown persons burned down Valeriia Gontareva’s house in the suburbs of Kyiv. Despite the noise in the press, the arsonists were never found. A month later, on the air of Kolomoisky’s “1+1” TV channel, actors of the comedy show “Evening Kvartal” sang a mocking song “The house was burning, ablaze”, the text of which was directly related to the former head of the National Bank.
The Prosecutor’s Office repeatedly insisted on Gontareva’s arrival in Ukraine. But they did not dare to declare her in international search. It was obvious to everyone that this story was personal revenge by Kolomoisky. Especially since the oligarch himself did not particularly hide it. On May 2, 2019, in an interview with Bihus Info, Ihor Kolomoisky stated that if necessary, Gontareva would be brought to Ukraine “privately”.
“If she does not fly in, nothing terrible, we will bring her if it will be necessary… Privately,” said Kolomoisky.