Linda Kinstler, Quartz: Ukraine is heading for a total economic collapse

When IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde announced Ukraine’s new, $17.5 billion bailout package Thursday morning, she suggested it would be a “turning point for Ukraine,” which stands to receive $40 billion in relief funding from various sources over the next four years. “This new four-year arrangement would support immediate economic stabilization in Ukraine as well as a set of bold policy reforms aimed at restoring robust growth over the medium term and improving living standards for the Ukrainian people,” Lagarde said from Brussels.

 But it will take a lot more than IMF billions to dig Ukraine out of economic crisis, and to implement the reforms Lagarde’s IMF team has demanded. In order to survive, Ukraine will need to fashion a new social contract with its citizens, one that sheds hundreds of social services left over from the Soviet era, which Ukraine’s nomenkatlura, its upper-middle class civil servants, still enjoy.

Update: Ukraine to get $40-billion in funding, IMF chief says -- Reuters

WNU Editor: Ukraine is not heading for a total economic collapse ... it is already there. And even though this IMF loan is a lot of money .... it is still a loan that needs to be paid back one day, and (this is the sad part) it is a drop in the bucket for what Ukraine really needs.