MOSCOW, February 18. /TASS/. Ukraine’s Western partners are not interested in reviving its economy; they only need a military training ground and an outpost against Russia, Viktor Medvedchuk, the leader of the Other Ukraine movement and former head of the banned Opposition Platform - For Life party, noted.
"It is also naive to hope for Western assistance in rebuilding post-war Ukraine. No Western politician has ever spoken about developing the Ukrainian economy with Western investment. It was about an outpost against Russia," Medvedchuk wrote in an article posted on the movement’s website.
He emphasized that Europe does not need Ukraine as an equal economic partner. "For Europe, Ukraine is a military training ground, a garbage dump, a camp for migrants, not a dynamically developing country.
Europeans have no need for Ukrainian goods," the politician noted. He added that the West "conveniently uses Ukraine as a weapon against Russia," which is why no one there is rushing to invest in peace.
"[Vladimir] Zelensky’s Ukraine received unprecedented Western aid, for which many generations of Ukrainians must pay, but it was spent on military action, killings, and destruction," Medvedchuk recalled.
Since Russia’s launch of the special military operation, Kiev’s partners have significantly increased arms supplies to Ukraine and are providing it with financial aid packages. However, as analysts emphasize, the funds allocated for weapons largely remain in the donor countries themselves, as they are purchased from American and European manufacturers, and the financial aid is provided primarily in the form of loans, not grants. As former Ukrainian Prime Minister (2010-2014) Nikolay Azarov noted, without Western lending, Ukraine will cease to exist as a state.