Original article (in Slovenian) was published on 10/10/2022
In a commentary for The Wall Street Journal, the Ukrainian president presented an investment initiative by the Ukrainian government inviting businesses to invest in the country.
Tomaz Mastnak, a columnist for the daily Dnevnik, claimed in his 21 September column that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had bragged in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal about how the right of workers to unionize and bargain had been eliminated in Ukraine and labor rights abolished.
Mastnak went on to state that “Zelensky deregulated the sale of arable land and used legislative amendments to drill holes in the law so that foreign corporations can grab hold of millions of hectares of Ukrainian land.”
Zelensky’s commentary Invest in the Future of Ukraine, which a portion of Mastnak’s column referred to, was published on 5 September. It makes no mention of the elimination of labor rights, it is a presentation of the government’s investment initiative Advantage Ukraine inviting foreign companies to invest in Ukraine.
The American economist Michael Hudson interpreted Zelensky’s Wall Street Journal Commentary on 9 September in discussion with the American portal Multipolarista. Asked what he thought about Ukraine being “open for business,” he said that the Ukrainian president was sending the message that he was eliminating the labor rights enshrined in the constitution, rejecting EU legislation, and rejecting the International Labour Organisation’s labor standards, policies, and programs.
Multipolarista is edited by Benjamin Norton, until January this year a journalist of the American portal The Grayzone. Media Bias/Fact Check, which evaluates media bias, has designated The Grayzone as a far-left biased outlet that promotes propaganda and conspiracy theories, and consistently produces biased reports.
Hudson’s interpretation derives from Norton’s opinion about the Ukraine Recovery Conference held in Switzerland in July this year. It was this event he was talking about before he asked Hudson about Ukraine’s openness to business. He said that Western European leaders “met together to plan neoliberal shock therapy to impose on Ukraine.”
The fact that Zelensky, speaking at the New York Stock Exchange on 6 September, offered 400 billion US dollars in investment opportunities in Ukraine, and the slogan of the initiative Advantage Ukraine, which mentions freedom, strength, and the country’s openness to business, is “a blatant symbol” of that plan, according to Norton.
But the national plan for the recovery of Ukraine, which is what the conference in Switzerland was about, stipulates that Ukraine will align its labor legislation to Europe’s between 2023 and 2025. The plan involves multiple other measures, for example, modernization of the armed forces, concern for a clean environment, and promotion of the business environment, including deregulation.
Mastnak also claimed in the column that “Zelensky deregulated the sale of arable land and used legislative amendments to drill holes in the law so that foreign corporations can grab hold of millions of hectares of Ukrainian land.”
We reported back in August that foreign companies may not buy farmland under current Ukrainian law. The exception is foreign physical persons, provided that their purchase is upheld by Ukrainian voters at a referendum.
After the Ukrainian government in 2001 imposed a moratorium on the sale of farmland, leasing became the main type of land management. There is a hole in the law concerning leasing – emphyteusis, long-term lease agreements granting full land use rights. But companies successfully lobbied for the enactment of emphyteusis in 2007, when Zelensky was not president yet.
The claim by the Dnevnik columnist Tomaz Mastnak that Ukrainian President Zelensky bragged about how labor rights in Ukraine were abolished under his watch is false.