So Ukraine is the better bet for investors like Soros. It is accomplishing what Syriza has hitherto refused to do - cooperating with the EU, IMF and other international creditors to implement “a radical reform program which is gaining momentum”. While there has been “continuing progress in internal reforms” under the pro-Western government of Petro Poroshenko, the EU remains preoccupied with Greece, where the best that can be hoped is for continued “muddling through” to try and keep it in the eurozone.
“Europe has been drip-feeding Ukraine, just as it has Greece”, Soros writes. This, despite the fact that the case for saving Ukraine is “black and white…Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine, in defending itself, is defending the values and principles on which the EU was built.” For Soros “the tragedy…is that the EU will lose the new Ukraine. The principles that Ukraine is defending – the very principles on which the EU is based – will be abandoned, and the EU will have to spend a lot more money on defending itself than it would need to spend helping the new Ukraine succeed.”