Last month, I wrote a column on one aspect of Western capital's entanglement in Ukraine, agriculture, and how this kind of economic link produces a kind of reversal of doux commerce. As a condition of foreign aid, Ukraine has had to liberalize its policies regarding land transfers, reopening opportunities for direct or indirect investment in some of the world’s most productive farmland by European and American interests, which, naturally, will urge their governments to protect those investments.

The left-leaning Oakland Institute on Tuesday released a report titled “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land,” examining in more granular detail the involvement of particular players in this theater. As we like to say here at TAC, read the whole thing; while we don’t necessarily share all of the Oakland Institutes premises, they’ve done great work. Of particular interest is their investigation of how Western financial institutions work with the corrupt Ukrainian oligarch class to get around restrictions of foreign investment.

If you don’t have time for the whole report, I recommend just casting an eye over the most alarming section, “Post-War Reconstruction Plans to Privatize Further,” which discusses the economic development plans being drawn up even now with the help of the World Bank and the IMF.  The somewhat sinister-sounding Ukraine Reform Tracker notes that “the post-war moment may present an opportunity to complete the difficult land reform by extending the right to purchase agricultural land to legal entities, including foreign ones.” In short, the end of the war won’t be the end of our entanglement in Ukraine; it’ll be just the beginning.