Debt, dependency, de-development, and war: historicising Ukraine’s financial subordination

The full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022 found Ukraine already the poorest country and one of the most indebted countries in Europe weathered by numerous economic crises and nearly 8 years of war. In this paper I show that Ukraine’s never-ending crises are not accidental but are an endemic part and an inevitable consequence of embedding the country into the global system of transnational capital order, where the right of capital to accumulate is upheld at expense of immiserating labour through uneven mechanisms of International Financial Subordination (IFS), including militarism. I engage analytical agenda of IFS alongside transnational historical materialist (Gramscian) methodology and state theory to show the effects of IFS on Ukraine. I outline a brief history and geopolitical dimensions of debt and energy import dependency, dollarization, financial, social, and economic vulnerabilities associated with the ongoing war and the multi-institutional Matrix of Reform, and assess erosion of Ukraine’s sovereignty.