Ukraine

English

Challenges of healthcare reform in Ukraine: on workers’ perspectives and struggles

By Lena Slobodian / 9 spalio, 2023

Healthcare is a part of critical infrastructure. In addition to being necessary for preventing social collapse, its adequate maintenance is very important for treating injured soldiers and civilians, thus allowing for the reduction of losses during war. Furthermore, in the long term perspective, medical professionals will leave Ukraine, especially with the new possibilities for integration created for Ukrainian refugees in western countries. This will make the rebuilding of Ukraine very difficult.

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Political Economist Jeffrey Sommers: on Baltic Inflation, Protecting Rich Grannies and Bending EU Fiscal Rules

By Karolis Dambrauskas / 11 sausio, 2023

But the other thing that property taxes do is take housing prices down. Every family, every household has a certain amount of money for housing – that’s the money they have for it and they won’t have more. And somebody is going to get that money. It’s either going to the state, in part through taxation, and will be used for kindergartens, healthcare, national defense, paving roads, all these things that are actually productive and help people and the economy. Or it can go to banks. As the property tax goes down, the housing price goes up because there’s more money available for the purchase of a property. Banks love that, because that means larger mortgages, larger fees, larger commissions and more debt service payments. The argument that you’ll get from the banks and the real estate sector as to why this is a bad idea is that they’re protecting grandma.

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Anti-War Resistance Inside Russia

By Justas Korsakovas / 12 gruodžio, 2022

“There are more sustainable ways of protest, we don’t want anti-war activists in jail. We need them active in the underground partisan movement. The main point of the anti-war movement inside Russia right now is to push away the moment when you get arrested as much as possible, so as to stay free and active, using other strategies than going to street protests openly.”

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Cost-of-Living Crisis in Central and Eastern Europe: an Overview

By Karolis Dambrauskas / 7 gruodžio, 2022

Reaction to the cost-of-living crisis runs into cultural, political and economic specificities of CEE: low levels of trust between people, lack of organising tradition, and difficult relationships with trade unions (which are always on the defensive). However, recently, there have been unprecedented successes in linking environmental issues to demands of trade unions. Public discourse is slowly shifting from anti-communist rhetoric to blaming oligarchs, although any major change is yet to come. On the other hand, trade unions are weak and are used to very low demands. Meanwhile, the far-right raises more ambitious demands (e.g., energy to everyone and good relations with Russia to secure the gas supply) and hijacks the left/progressive agenda.