The American Woman Who Stands Between Putin and Ukraine - Why Natalie Jaresko is as important as the country’s generalsMarch 5, 2015
by Brett Forrest
Ukraine is a nation at war, which is why Natalie Jaresko, the minister of finance, has traveled 20 miles from Kiev to the town of Irpin, a settlement of 40,000 on the edge of a pine forest. She’s here to visit a rearguard army hospital and to console convalescing veterans of recent battles against Russian forces and their proxies in the Ukrainian east. “Where did you serve?” she asks, moving slowly from room to room. “How were you wounded?” She may be from Chicago’s West Side, but she speaks Ukrainian fluently, and if anyone notices her American accent, no one seems to care. Jaresko tells the soldiers they’re heroes, the country’s national accountant handling a job for generals. The crisis has thrust people into unlikely roles.
Three months ago, Jaresko, 49, left the private equity firm that she co-founded in Ukraine in 2006 to join the government of Petro Poroshenko. A billionaire chocolate and confectionery magnate, he was elected president after the uprising known as the Euromaidan Revolution. At the time, Jaresko didn’t even have Ukrainian citizenship. Now, as the country’s top economic official, she’s Ukraine’s liaison to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Tax reform is hers. So is the treasury. She must construct a national budget out of lint. “I can’t wait for the situation to be perfect,” Jaresko says.
A little less than a year since Poroshenko took office, the world’s attention has focused largely on the fighting in eastern Ukraine. It’s a conflict that began in February 2014, days after President Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine in the wake of the Euromaidan protests. The war has since killed roughly 6,000.
Yet whether Ukraine succeeds as an independent democratic nation arguably depends as much on the efforts of Jaresko and her colleagues as it does on the military battles. Together they must rebuild a shattered economy and restore international confidence in Ukraine while confronting the corruption and cronyism that have haunted the country since the fall of communism. And they must somehow do so as state-owned banks teeter on the brink of collapse, the national treasury counts its last foreign notes, and inflation is at 28 percent and rising. One day last month, within a few hours, the local currency, the hryvnia, lost a third of its value. The longer the war carries on and reforms are delayed, the more hostile Ukrainians will become to their government and its Western supporters, leaving the country even more vulnerable to Vladimir Putin.
Jaresko, 5 feet 6 inches tall, wears her dark hair at chin length. As she continues through the Irpin hospital, she’s solemn, respectful. More soldiers receive her, cramped two and three to closetlike rooms, jammed into beds sized for children. They discuss their lack of firepower in the field: Why don’t we have modern weapons? How does the enemy know where we are all the time? Jaresko listens. She knows better than any general that Ukraine doesn’t have the funds to better arm itself.
She asks the soldiers what they plan to do once they’ve recovered. To a man, they say they’ll return to the front lines. Jaresko’s business until now has been figures, not soldiers or sentiment. Carrying this new burden, she walks the parquet floor of the hospital’s dark, old Soviet hallway. There are tears. She blinks them away. This sure is something she’s gotten herself into.
Jaresko’s father, Ivan, was born in 1932 in Poltava, 200 miles east of Kiev. During World War II, he was deported with his family to a Nazi camp inside Germany. After the war, he immigrated to Chicago, where he met Jaresko’s mother, Maria, another Ukrainian refugee. They raised three children in lower-middle-class Wood Dale, 20 miles northwest of the city whose skyscrapers symbolized the ambition and opportunity of their adopted homeland.
“It’s the typical story of a family that goes through Ellis Island,” Jaresko recalls in mid-February at Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers building, a Soviet-era structure of drafty imperiousness in central Kiev. It’s evening, and we’re sitting at the head of an oval conference table. “The United States offers that opportunity, freedom, the ability to dream—especially in that ’50s, post-World War II period,” she says. Jaresko spent childhood weekends at Ukrainian school and church, but her family spoke English at home. “My father really wanted us to integrate into American society,” she says. “He was very careful to avoid politics. The post-McCarthy era convinced my father that we had to become middle-class Americans.”
Jaresko majored in accounting at DePaul University, then picked up a master’s in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School in 1989. Her father wasn’t impressed. “He very much believed in only the private sector,” she says. “Government, for him because of his background, was something you wanted to avoid.” After the Kennedy School, Jaresko took a job on the economic desk of the Department of State’s office of Soviet affairs. When the Soviet Union collapsed, she went to Kiev in 1992, one of eight diplomats charged with opening the U.S. embassy there. She’s lived in Ukraine ever since. “My father couldn’t understand what happened, what went wrong,” she says. “He came to the land of milk and honey, and here I was, attracted back to the other.”
Jaresko could see firsthand that there would be no easy path for Ukraine to follow in its transition to a market economy. Criminal posturing was the national style. All the same, she recognized the opportunities that existed in a country that was rapidly privatizing its state-owned assets. She left her diplomatic post and joined the Western NIS Enterprise Fund, an organization backed by the U.S. Agency for International Development and designed to kick-start small and midsize Ukrainian businesses.
In the mid-1990s, Ukraine endured hyperinflation of 10,000 percent. A few years later came the shock waves of Russia’s financial crisis. The Ukrainian economy showed its first signs of growth only in 2000, after almost a decade of decline. Then, in 2004, came the Orange Revolution. While the country entered a new period of uncertainty, international institutional investors began to arrive. Two years later, Jaresko and three partners opened investment management firm Horizon Capital. It managed the Western NIS Enterprise Fund and eventually raised two more. When she left last December, it had roughly $600 million of Ukrainian investments under management. (Jaresko and her husband, Ihor Figlus, divorced in 2011. He’s returned to the U.S. Their two school-age children live in Kiev with Jaresko.)
Далі тут:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-03-05/putin-s-american-foe-in-ukraine-finance-minister-natalie-jaresko
