Among the many plans that the Russian invasion of Ukraine thwarted, one was especially dear to President Volodymyr Zelesnky. On December 24, 2021, two months before the start of the war and seeming almost indifferent to rising tensions on the border, he attended an event with businessmen to sell an infrastructure investment project.
The budget reserved for this year was for 140 billion hryvnias (R$ 24 billion). The amount, obviously, could not be spent and today it sounds almost negligible when the impacts of the conflict in the sector are estimated: direct damage caused to highways, bridges and other structures totals US$ 30 billion (R$ 146 billion), more than six times the imagined for a year of project.
The total loss, taking into account all sectors of the economy, could reach US$ 1 trillion (R$ 4.9 trillion), according to the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), not counting the cost. that any war takes, in the form of lives.
Zelensky was strongly committed to the program, called Great Construction and created in 2019. “A few years ago, an event called Roads and Bridges was something like a forum about aliens or time travel. A discussion that everyone heard about, but almost nobody saw it in practice,” the president boasted in December.
Through the project, the Ukrainian government had so far built or repaired more than 14,000 kilometers of roads – around 40% of the country’s road network, known as one of the worst in Europe –, 600 bridges, as well as dozens of schools and hospitals, in partnership with local authorities.
By 2021, 106 billion hryvnia (R$18 billion) had been spent, a fivefold increase over the previous two years. For this year, the idea was to further expand investments, which, in the view of analysts, would generate more than 200,000 jobs.
“The works actually started in 2020, simultaneously with the crisis generated by Covid-19. The central idea was to stimulate the economy, putting a lot of money in sectors such as infrastructure”, says Andrii Bespiatov, director and researcher at Dragon Capital, a company of Kiev-based investments.
The war, of course, interrupted everything: with the Russian invasion, the money set aside had to be reallocated and thousands of kilometers of roads that still needed to be repaired were even more destroyed, as well as other equipment.
Among the works that turned out to be in vain is the reconstruction of Kherson airport, which was bombed in the first weeks of the conflict. The city is now under the control of Moscow forces, with the local financial system already starting to be converted to Russian rubles. According to the programme’s website, this year the road network in the south of the country, which connects cities such as Odessa, Mikolaiv and Mariupol – all under heavy attack, would also be renewed this year, as part of the Kremlin’s strategy to create a land connection with Crimea. attached in 2014.
If leading the Ukrainian resistance in the war had the power to improve Zelensky’s popularity ratings, the politician’s bet for that until the conflict erupted was precisely the billionaire Big Construction. Elected with 70% more of the vote in 2019, the president was approved at the end of 2021 by about 20% of the population, according to local polling institutes.
For Mikhail Alexseev, professor of political science at San Diego State University (USA), the negative trend in popularity followed the pattern of demands exerted on previous incumbents. “If you asked me if this bill would help Zelensky win another election if the war hadn’t happened, I’d say yes. But halfway through his term, the best he could do was not let the approval drop so low,” he says.
According to Alexseev, Ukrainian political culture makes it difficult for the electorate to associate great works with the president’s eventual success. “In a system where the figure of the president is strong, like in Brazil, it is easier to attribute these achievements to the leadership, but in Ukraine people think that the bottom can do more than the top,” he says. “When things go bad, of course, everyone blames the president, but getting credit is harder.”
In this sense, corruption scandals involving the program also overshadowed the renewal speech proposed by Zelensky as a candidate. Also in November 2020, a former advisor accused the government of favoring six companies in bidding for works, encouraging the creation of a cartel.
The administration would also have given the go-ahead for the diversion of resources from a billion-dollar fund dedicated to fighting the pandemic — in Ukraine, just before the invasion, only 35% of the population had completed the first vaccination cycle, according to the Our World in Data platform. “The official justification was that the government was repairing roads leading to hospitals,” recalls Bespiatov.
Now, however, the reports of paved roads even to connect small villages and the impression that the Ukrainian infrastructure and road network were really improving are unimportant: when the war ends, this path will have to be traveled again.
