Page 63 - bne magazine September 2023

bne September 2023
ranges from the tiresome misrepresentation of Nato expansion as overt aggression by the US rather than a desperate desire
by nations long oppressed by Russia to secure their freedom,
to secret bioweapons labs allegedly built on Ukrainian soil, to highly overstated Ukrainian casualty figures and complaints about the amount of US military aid which, in reality, is a drop in the country’s overall military budget.
Most destructive, however, is that they trivialise the very profound moral component of this war. In undertaking every effort to legitimise Putin’s grievances for the start of this conflict, they try to instill complexity where none exists, obfuscating the fact that, actually, it is simply a miscalculated act of naked aggression against a country that did not seek war. Putin launched an unprovoked attack against a neighboring country whose population, time and again, refused to mimic the slavishness of their Russian cousins. Full stop! Everything else is just window dressing.
Ukraine is problematic in that it has a long history of corruption and economic underperformance, and a rife kleptocracy. These deficiencies can not and should not be whitewashed, and they are not. The government's current anti-corruption campaign has its detractors, and there is reason to believe that it is driven in equal parts by a desire to curb corruption and a play to "redistribute" assets left dangling in the uncertainty of war. The politicians and oligarchs play their games in all circumstances, good or bad, but that is the nature of the beast. But this war is not about the politicians and the oligarchs, it is about the people. The politicians and the oligarchs may be rotten, but the Ukrainian people, en masse, are not.
The Ukrainians have historically been an unruly lot. An amalgamation of clans, they are infamous for their propensity to squabble and notoriously difficult to unite. Ukraine has a historical penchant for individual freedom, making its politics nasty and combative. Scenes from the Rada of deputies going at each other, sometimes with fists, are a testament to both the
NEMETHY
Opinion 63 difficulty and the beauty of the Ukrainian spirit. It may not be
pretty or genteel, but it is never slavish.
They have time and again chosen the chaos of democracy
over a comfortable kleptocracy, Western ideals over autocratic oppression, and freedom over slavery. 89% of the population identify corruption as the number one problem facing their country. Soldiers fighting on the front lines are not dying to preserve a society that perpetuates a cozy relationship between the oligarchs and the state. They and the Ukrainian people
are fighting for a chance to create a society that will be better than what it was before. They are fighting for a future different than the bleak nihilism offered by Putin. They are fighting for democracy, the rule of law, and economic prosperity. Because they are unified in that vision, they remain undaunted in
their determination to fight until the end. When I speak to friends and relatives in Ukraine, the message is clear: “We are exhausted by the war, by the nightly air attacks, by the lives sacrificed by our soldiers, but we will never give up.”
This is not meant to be a soliloquy to the exceptionalism or ubiquitous goodness of the Ukrainian people. They are people, like everyone else, with their faults and weaknesses, good qualities and bad. But the one quality they have in spades is a dream to build a country upon the ideals of Western liberalism. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or the many other attempts to impose Western ideals on societies where they were neither wanted nor needed, Ukraine is a society striving for the freedom to implement our shared principles as a foundation for its future. As I have written before, there are not many moral wars being fought in the world, but this happens to be one, and for that reason alone, it is a cause worth supporting regardless of the cynical bylines being peddled with increasing fervor.
Alexander Kabanovsky is formerly a Russia-based banker and entrepreneur. This article first appeared on his substack “Thinking Out Loud”
Why is Hungary the EU inflation leader? Les Nemethy, Dr Peter Akos Bod
According to Eurostat’s release dated July 19, Hungary had roughly triple the EU average inflation and almost double the next highest countries (Poland, Czechia and Slovakia).
Chart on the next page shows Hungary as such a massive outlier, that the analysis should be of interest also to non-Hungarian readers.
In this article, we don’t look at general reasons for inflation,
only at factors that make exceptionally high inflation a “Hungaricum”, (e.g. uniquely Hungarian feature). We outline six factors which are either unique to Hungary, or where Hungary has been a category “winner”:
1. Devaluation as a strategy for competitiveness. Hungary is an open, export-driven economy, exporting primarily to the EU. Hungarian productivity growth (at about 0.8% per annum between 2010 and 2022) was roughly half the EU average. Hungary’s competitiveness rankings (according
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