Ukraine’s Western-backed leader Volodymyr Zelensky sent a love letter to US companies, thanking “such giants of the international financial and investment world as BlackRock, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs” for buying up his country’s assets. “Everyone can become a big business by working with Ukraine”, he enticed, claiming that the reconstruction of his nation “will be the largest economic project of our time in Europe”. Zelensky likewise praised the Starlink company of billionaire Elon Musk for its technological support. In September 2022, Zelensky symbolically rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange via video stream… In a meeting in Switzerland in July 2022, Western and Ukrainian government representatives published economic blueprints that called for Kiev to cut labor laws, “open markets”, drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors”. Zelensky has used the emergency of the war to ram through harsh anti-labor legislation, suspending collective bargaining rights and essentially making it illegal for most workers to form a union. Economist Michael Hudson compared Zelensky’s extreme neoliberal policies to those of Chile’s far-right US-backed former dictator Augusto Pinochet… The Ukrainian government’s economic plan looked like a scene out of a libertarian science-fiction film, where everything is privatized and corporations are free to exploit anyone without any regulation.