Ukraine's Neoliberal Reconstruction (Bonus Version)

The chair of the Ukrainian parliament's economic affairs committee explains the "fast state" concept.

I was the weekend essay over at the New Statesman last month with a piece about Ukraine’s reconstruction plans and theirs contentious ideological foundations. The finished product is a dramatically scaled down version of the original, which was far too long (massive credit to my editors for making the sprawling piece work so well). In the piece, I argue that Ukraine’s reconstruction plans represent a continuation of 1990s “shock therapy”, updated for the 21st century: 

The current war has introduced an innovation on the old formula: the fusion of neoliberal economic policies with cowboy advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation. Wartime Ukraine has already seen a dramatic influx of Western donor funds, consultants, experts, engineers and Silicon Valley venture capital. The result has been radical experiments in the introduction of AI-enhanced platforms for mine clearance and the rapid collation of commercial satellite data (both supplied by Peter Thiel’s Palantir); and economic strategies like the “fast state”, a Ukrainian government proposal that envisions a state so streamlined that it “disappears in one’s own efficiency”.

However, the original piece included an interview I did with Dmytro Natalukha, an MP in Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party and chair of the economic affairs committee in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. Natalukha is one of the chief architects of the “fast state” concept mentioned in the piece. I thought I’d reproduce part of the interview I conducted with him here so you’d get a better sense of what this somewhat nebulous concept means. I asked him, “Can you explain what you mean by a ‘fast state’ and what concrete, administrative, and technological changes it would entail?”