Dmytro Shmykiv, the former Microsoft Ukraine CEO who is now a year on the job as deputy head of the Presidential Administration, is putting the finishing touches on his pitch to U.S. investors for next week.
Shymkiv said he will focus on Ukraine as a “homeland for innovators” in agriculture, engineering, aerospace, metallurgy and other areas. He will sprinkle his talk with personal success stories and also hopes to be able to have announcements to make about new investments coming to Ukraine.
But perhaps more than anything else, Shymkiv sees the July 13 U.S.-Ukraine Business Forum in Washington, D.C., as an opportunity to dispel Russian lies about Ukraine’s history and to inject optimism about Ukraine’s future — to foreigners and Ukrainians alike.
“Ukraine has a good story about what’s happening today. It’s very often twisted by Russia,” Shymkiv said in an interview from his Bankova Street office. “A bit of positive stories and a bit of positive attitude will drive us to much better energy and a positive state of mind. When a country is in a positive state of the mind, even with Russian aggression and everything, it just drives a different dynamic. Very often we are too skeptical. But we do need to celebrate success.”
Like others, Shymkiv sees the human and national tragedy inflicted by Russia’s war against Ukraine. But he also sees the opportunities the war presents if Ukraine prevails.
Right now, Ukraine is holding off the Russian army, something that no other army in the world is doing. And, as its ability to defend itself improves during the 17-month-old conflict, Shymkiv sees Ukrainian innovation playing out with advancements of drones, precision marksmanship and artillery control.
Where others bemoan the ruined infrastructure of the Russian-occupied Donbas, Shymkiv sees opportunities — after the war is won — to create modern infrastructure to replace the destroyed parts, much of which was old and deteriorating anyway.
“Why don’t we look at this as an opportunity?” Shymkiv asks. “A lot of engineering and innovations came from the military. Leonardo da Vinci started as a military engineer…We see today an interesting possibility for transformation, where the needs and desire to protect the country (can stimulate) new inventions for science and human history.”
In reciting Ukraine’s history of innovation, Shymkiv talks about Sikorsky helicopters, started by a Kyiv native, the Antonov airplanes, space research, rocket launchers, high tech and health care innovations. Some of the achievements came during the Soviet Union and seem to bolster Vladimir Putin’s argument that Ukraine and Russia are one country.
That’s not the case at all, Shymkiv said.
“For centuries, Ukraine has always been deprived of being independent,” Shymkiv said. “The Soviet Union was bad. It was bad for creativity and extremely bad for those who were engineers. To those who are preaching the engineering success of the Soviet Union, sorry: People and engineers had to suffer and had to live in unbearable conditions.”
Shymkiv, 39, described himself “as a faithful Soviet Union person until I saw the truth” and learned about his relatives, including his grandparents, killed in the Soviet era, some during the 1932-33 Holodomor.
After learning about “all the ugly things the Soviet Union did,” Shymkiv also studied how Ukrainian engineers and scientists saw opportunities and emigrated to the West, “where they can be prosperous and wealthy people.”
Nonetheless, “Ukrainian engineering and scientific schools are still very strong today, going from the secondary level and up,” giving the nation a platform to build on, Shmykiv said.
Shymkiv’s faith in Ukraine’s turnaround even extends to its criminal justice and legal system, which many people — including lawyers — have written off as hopelessly corrupt and in need of a complete overhaul.
Shymkiv still has faith in General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin and sees modest victories on the legal front through the creation of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the new Kyiv police force.
But he said that he, of all people, does not underestimate the enormous resistance to change since he encounters it all the time.
“We have resistance from the oligarchy. We have resistance from bureaucrats. We have resistance from those who would like to keep the status quo,” Shymkiv said. “We need to understand that there are a lot of people who are corrupted and will continue to do everything possible” to keep their sources of income. “When they were stealing billions, they were hiring the best” lawyers and companies to protect their assets, he said.
“We can win,” he said. “I know it’s a complex, complex problem. We need to figure out a shorter path” to instilling rule of law. “If the government has the passion to fix it, then it will be fixed. The current government — the prime minister, the justice minister — have a strong passion to fix it.”
None of the problems, however, should deter multinational companies from staying or investment funds from entering Ukraine. He sees, in particular, mid-sized investment funds as being more aggressive, less deterred by risk and more likely to seize opportunities in Ukraine’s economy, which, despite the problems, have made many firms and people spectacularly wealthy.
On a grander scale, Ukraine has been trying to get the West to come up with a Greek-sized financial package, which was more than $200 billion. But it appears that Ukraine will have to survive with multi-year commitments of about $40 billion, mainly in loans and hopefully debt writedowns. He said money would have been much better spent on Ukraine than Greece.
Ukraine, of course, also hopes for more help from America in defending from Russia’s war or, as Shymkiv said, getting “the big guy” to stand next to the “small guy” under attack from another “big guy.” A tougher stance can get Russia to back off, he said, especially because so many Russians have invested so much in the United States.
“There’s a lot of ways that the U.S. can make a difference,” Shymkiv said. Even without more immediate financial assistance, the United States can help by creating a pool of risk insurance to open up lines of credit for trade deals.
In the end, the message to Washington, D.C., is that, despite all of Ukraine’s challenges, it is “our responsibility to make the changes. Is it going fast, no? Do you have commitment of right people to do it? Yes. In the end, that’s more important.”
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected].
