But their capitalist system didn't end slavery. People slave away for peanuts for oligarchs and corrupt bureaucrats with zero chance of ever climbing out of that swamp. For a lot of them, the war with Russia actually made their dream of getting the hell out of Ukraine come true.
Discussion
what you're describing is socialism
as I said, it's a mixed economy
Don't substitute concepts. I described capitalism specifically. And in the modern world, capitalism can exist only when it is backed by the strongest military, capable of destabilizing the situation in any oil-rich country.
Iran and Venezuela are the next candidates to feed the AI bubble.
ok since you've defined your terms like that then yes, I agree "capitalism" is bad
still a little better than full socialism
but of course laissez faire voluntarism is the ideal
The fact that communism turned Ukraine into an energy-developed state does not negate the existence of regions where communism did nothing. Yes, they received benefits from communism, but the entire Soviet "machine" was working for those benefits. In other words, it is probably wrong to expect capitalist Ukraine to do what the Soviet Union did, and what Ukraine itself did as part of that union. But honestly, the scale of Ukraine's decline after the Soviet period is striking. This is a rare case where the showcase of capitalism looks worse.
if you call millions of dead people by hunger a benefit
This famine was not only the result of mistakes by the Soviet leadership, but also, more broadly, a consequence of the civil war and drought. Ukrainian propaganda, of course, calls it a genocide, but in reality, everyone was dying from hunger there, regardless of nationality. Furthermore, it should be remembered that, historically, very soon after the Civil War, the Second World War began. The country had no time to recover, and nevertheless, Ukraine became literally a leading republic of the Union. You could boldly take Ukraine of that period and compare it with any "capitalist" Western European state, and Ukraine was no worse.
Yes, Ukrainian stores of that time, by today's standards, would have seemed overly eco-friendly — communism could not provide a wide range of consumer goods. In the best years, if a single product was available in two or three variations, it was considered good. But on a larger scale, the projects that Ukraine implemented under communism still look unique and ambitious even today. Some achievements were unmatched anywhere in the world. And, of course, capitalist Ukraine is not even capable of building a public restroom. Building a hydroelectric power station is simply impossible for them. They couldn't even complete the Soviet-era projects, and this was long before Russia began to destabilize their country.
In 1933, Stalin seized grain from Ukraine and distributed it to urban non Ukrainian populations. Collectivisation was pushed there more strongly than other regions to try to break Ukrainian nationalism. It wasn't so much that they were trying to starve them, they assumed they were hiding food, but Soviet policies had reduced grain output.
Immediately post USSR, Ukraine had a GDP per capita 1/3rd of Russia's. The free market isn't a magic wand that makes money fall from the sky. Natural resources, human capital, trade agreements and legal frameworks have a large effect.
I don't live in Ukraine, although there are many Ukrainians here, and the famine is remembered here just the same. Apparently, Stalin, together with Ukrainian nationalists, decided to starve everyone else as well — even those who weren't nationalists. He just turned out to be a very angry Georgian.
The biggest anecdote is the demarcation of Ukraine's borders. Nowadays Ukrainian propaganda claims that the Russian side did everything it could to obstruct the formation of Ukraine's land borders. And indeed, formally Ukraine's border was finalized by Putin in 2004, and Ukraine as a fully established state only really appeared in 2010. But what was there before that? I'm too old to remember the press of the 90s. The whole issue of Ukraine's borders was about money. They were literally fighting over pennies there and couldn't reach an agreement even over trivial nonsense.
It's as if back then nobody was thinking about a free market (which, of course, is a fairy tale in itself) or any kind of development. The Russian oligarchs, who had effectively seized power, wanted to ship resources to Europe for next to nothing, while Ukraine was squeezing dry whatever opportunities it still had left after the Soviet Union.