£1.1bn of taxpayers’ money given to Ukraine by unelected EU Vice-President Dombrovskis. Did you know? And are you content about this?

This is how the EU has been courting Ukraine to join the EU.

Ukrainian Premier Denys Anatoliyovych Shmyhal (Денис Анатолійович Шмигаль, in Ukrainian) visited Brussels on On Thursday 23 July 2020 and left a happy man, with a gift of £1.1 billion in his pocket on top of the funding the EU has already been providing to this man’s country.

On Thursday 23 July 2020, Mr Shmyal met the EU’s “Executive Vice-President for An Economy that Works for People”, Valdis Dombrovskis.

Remarks by the EU’s “Executive Vice-President for An Economy that Works for People”

“The EU has shown solidarity with Ukraine also in the face of the pandemic and last month it agreed to a support package of €190 million.”

“As part of our objective to help our neighbourhood cope with the fallout of the pandemic, we will provide Ukraine with emergency macro-financial assistance of €1.2 billion — it’s far more than we provide to any other partner.”

“We are pleased to have concluded the negotiations on the Memorandum of Understanding for the new programme.”

Note: Typically the UK paid around 12.5% of the EU’s bills.

About the EU and the Ukraine

According to the EU Commission, “Ukraine is a priority partner for the European Union (EU).”

Since 2014, the EU and its Financial Institutions have mobilised more than €15 billion in grants and loans to Ukraine. In 2019 the EU’s exports to Ukraine amounted to just €24bn. To put this into context, the EU’s exports to the UK last year totalled over £372bn

Who gave the Ukrainian Premier £1.1 bn in 2020?

The EU’s “Executive Vice-President for An Economy that Works for People”, Valdis Dombrovskis, comes from Latvia.

Latvia is a country with a GDP of just $35 bn — that’s 78 times smaller than the UK’s economy and two-thirds that of the North-East of England. He was selected by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and his appointment was rubber-stamped by the EU Parliament. His only experience outside national and EU politics was as a laboratory assistant and researcher.

When I research and publish reports like this, I mean no disrespect to the countries we mention — in this case, Ukraine and Latvia. I feel obliged to put the size of the countries I write about into perspective for readers and the public, to counter the Establishment narrative that the United Kingdom is a poor minnow on the world stage. It is most decidedly not.

The other reason I publish on matters like this is that few British people working in broadcasting or amongst the London commentariat ‘elites’ will ever do so. In fact, I do not believe they have the first idea of what the EU gets up to each day. They still seem to have some form of utopian vision of the European Union, built on aspiration and naivete, rather than any real knowledge.

The EU just never stops

The further largesse from the EU to Ukraine is just another example of the way in which the EU had been disbursing UK taxpayers’ money, with no Parliamentary scrutiny in Westminster. This is happening even though the United Kingdom has supposedly left the EU, and of course, it now has absolutely no say in how the EU spends its money. If this isn’t “taxation without representation”, we don’t know what is. To end on a positive note, the Ukrainian Prime Minister, Mr Denys Anatoliyovych Shmyhal, drives a Land Rover Discovery Sport. At least that represents one export from the United Kingdom to Ukraine.

[ Sources: EU Commission | Ukrainian Government ]