‘Famine is part of Russia’s strategy’: Zelensky’s economic adviser on Putin’s tactics

Alexander Rodnyansky has a desk waiting for him back at Cambridge, where he’s currently on sabbatical from his role as a junior economics professor. But he won’t be returning for some time. He’s working from Kyiv, prioritising his other job: as economic adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky.

Rodnyansky was in Ukraine when the war broke out and he could easily have returned to the UK. ‘That wasn’t really much of a thought,’ he says. ‘I’m sixth-generation Kyiv. I was just going to stay.’ He became a full-time presidential adviser two years ago, hired to help reform Ukraine’s financial institutions, including the privatisation of state-owned commercial banks. ‘About 55 per cent of our banks are government-owned,’ he says. ‘That’s very unnatural for a market economy.’ Ukraine was hoping to modernise in a way post-Soviet Russia has failed to do.

Ukraine’s economy was expected to grow by around 3.5 per cent this year, he says. The government’s plan was to introduce ‘transformations in the judiciary’ to tackle the power of the oligarchs. ‘I would certainly say that Ukraine was on a stable path. And that’s one of the reasons why the Russian side didn’t want to tolerate this for much longer.’

Does he think Vladimir Putin’s invasion was, in part, motivated by a fear that Ukrainians were better off than Russians? ‘The economics [of the invasion] comes in a slightly more nuanced way,’ he explains. ‘For years, Russia’s economy has been in stagnation. For the past ten years, real incomes there have actually fallen. So [Putin] came to the conclusion that there wasn’t much he could do in terms of economic achievements. He had to resort to military means.’

Putin’s ‘special operation’ may have failed in its original strategy to take Kyiv, but as Russia’s tactics have hardened in the Donbas there has been an enormous toll on Ukraine’s industry.