From forests to the southern seas – how exactly Ukraine is being carved up

TRANSCRIPT AND TRANSLATION

How Ukraine Has Already Been Carved Up

Good Lord, everyone—how stupid I’ve been! I kept tormenting that poor camera, when it turns out that “180” refers simply to the length of the shorter side of the video.

So when you complain that my picture is the wrong shape, this is what has been happening. If I film in a square format, it cuts me off at the top and bottom. If I film horizontally, it crops me like this, and then I stretch it to fit YouTube—so everything becomes distorted and blurry. The poor telephone was not to blame at all.

Let us try it this way. Besides, I love waving my hands about when I speak.

It was very funny when I accidentally appeared in a television series. The director noticed me turning up my sleeves and said that it looked charming, so she put me in the scene as well. But I cannot talk without gesticulating. We filmed for five hours, and the director kept coming over and saying, “Will you stop that? You speak like Lenin—as though you are declaiming to a crowd!”

Eventually they put a roll of crime-scene tape in my hands, hoping that would stop me. It didn’t. I continued waving my arms anyway.

But today we are going to talk about how Ukraine has already been bought up and divided among outsiders.

The Legal Question

What has always interested me is the legal mechanism: how did they actually manage it?

Before the war of 2022, Ukraine passed a law lifting the moratorium on the sale of agricultural land. If you now ask an artificial-intelligence program whether foreigners are permitted to buy Ukrainian agricultural land, it will tell you no.

And formally that is true.

Before 2020 the moratorium applied to everybody. Even Ukrainians who owned agricultural land could not freely dispose of it. The moratorium was then lifted, allowing Ukrainians to buy and sell it—but supposedly not foreigners.

I assumed that foreigners must nevertheless have begun buying the land. But how did companies such as BlackRock actually get in?

At first I thought the answer lay in changing the designated use of the land. Under the moratorium it had also been difficult to transfer agricultural land into another category. Once the moratorium was lifted, perhaps agricultural land could be redesignated for construction and then sold to foreigners.

But no—that is not the whole answer either.

Emphyteusis: Ownership Without Control

It turns out that there are several different instruments. One of them, which existed even during the moratorium, is called emphyteusis.

This is a rather unusual feature of Ukrainian law. Through emphyteusis, you can transfer the use of your land to somebody else—including a foreign party—for an extremely long period.

Legally, you remain the owner. In practice, however, you may lose even the right to enter the property. If the land passes to your children by inheritance, they inherit the same obligations.

Thus the mechanism existed even while agricultural land supposedly could not be sold.

Debt Secured Against the Land and the Business

Why, then, did lifting the moratorium make such a difference? Why do people say that once it was lifted, the land was immediately sold to Western capital?

They used essentially the same mechanism that Russian capital attempted to impose upon Abkhazia.

Thank God the Abkhazians did not permit it, because otherwise that would have been the end of Abkhazia. If you imagine Russian capitalism is somehow better than Western capitalism, it is not. It is just as dreadful and merciless.

Once the Ukrainian moratorium was removed, land became available to the global financial market—not necessarily through direct sale, but as collateral.

Suppose the owner operates a pig farm. He can now borrow from Western as well as Ukrainian banks, pledging his land, shares or business assets as security.

Something similar was attempted in Abkhazia through the proposed apartment law. A Russian developer might enter the country proposing to build a hotel. The land itself belonged to the state and could only be leased. But the developer wanted the right to pledge the site to a Russian bank as security for a loan.

If the loan were not repaid, the bank could seize the pledged rights. The real purpose, therefore, need not have been to build a hotel at all. It could have been a mechanism for transferring control of valuable coastal land to Russian banks.

That is essentially what happened in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s largest agricultural holdings had borrowed for years in dollars and euros, using their shares, processing plants, port terminals, grain elevators and other assets as security.

Then came the fighting, the blockade of the ports, the destruction of infrastructure and the collapse of prices within Ukraine. Many companies could no longer service debts amounting to billions.

Here, then, we can see another concrete Western interest in the Ukrainian war.

The Takeover Mechanism

Western financial giants—companies such as Vanguard, BlackRock and Blackstone—and major agricultural traders such as Cargill, Bunge and ADM can operate according to the following sequence.

First comes the purchase of debt. Funds acquire the now heavily discounted bonds and Eurobonds of Ukrainian agricultural companies. Because the war has caused their value to collapse, these securities can be bought for next to nothing.

Then comes bankruptcy or restructuring. When an agricultural holding defaults, its creditors take possession of the pledged assets: elevators, factories, shares, terminals and other infrastructure.

Perhaps they do not legally acquire the agricultural land itself. But they acquire the company, its long-term leases, its logistics and all the infrastructure necessary to exploit the land.

Finally, control changes hands. The Ukrainian oligarch loses his company, while an American or European fund gains control of the board of directors and the productive assets.

That is the important distinction. The land title itself may not pass to the foreigner, but the leasehold, factories, elevators, transport and export infrastructure do. Formal ownership becomes almost irrelevant.

Bankruptcy as Expropriation

I have finally understood the bankruptcy operations that were so common in Russia during the 2000s.

A friend of mine, who is now a government legal adviser, was then a young lawyer engaged in precisely this sort of work. I was always trying to get her to explain why apparently viable enterprises were deliberately pushed into bankruptcy.

“What is really going on?” I would ask. “What lies behind all these bankruptcies?”

She would look at me with an expression of perfect innocence and say, “Nothing. We simply have to conduct the bankruptcy procedure.”

But this is what lies behind it: an enterprise can be driven into bankruptcy so that somebody else can take possession of it.

Why Investors Are Not Waiting for Peace

Let us return to Ukraine and consider what is being taken now.

The most interesting point is that Western business is not waiting for the war to end. At first this seems peculiar. How can the Ukrainian government promise assets to investors when nobody yet knows how the war will finish or how much additional territory Russia may take?

Even in agricultural terms, Russia has already taken some of Ukraine’s best land. Much of the irrigated black-earth region lies in the east and south. Russia does not yet hold all of the south, but I believe that is where events are heading.

Yet foreign investors do not care, because the most profitable moment to acquire assets is now. After the fighting ends, surviving Ukrainian assets will rise in value.

The choicest pieces must therefore be divided while Kyiv remains wholly financially dependent upon Washington and Brussels.

Dry Ports and Export Corridors

In western Ukraine—in the Transcarpathian, Lviv and Volyn regions—agricultural land is being converted into enormous “dry ports,” railway terminals and warehouses. So they are changing its designated use after all.

These facilities are intended to control the entire flow of Ukrainian exports into the European Union.

I knew they would find a loophole. In a country as corrupt as Ukraine, I simply could not believe it would be impossible to change the official purpose for which land may be used.

As a result, American companies can control the flow of Ukrainian exports without necessarily owning the fields themselves.

Energy and Industrial Assets

The same process is occurring in the energy sector.

Under cover of rebuilding what has been destroyed, American and European companies are acquiring land-use rights in western Ukraine for “green energy”: wind farms and solar-power stations.

I am thoroughly sick of this green-energy business.

Land is removed from agricultural use and transferred, directly or functionally, to foreign-controlled projects.

The same debt mechanism is being applied to Ukrainian industrial giants. Grain elevators, processing plants and port terminals—including terminals around Odesa—are moving under foreign control.

When Trump appears on television and says, “We can enter Ukraine now and take whatever we want,” he is not really speaking to ordinary people. He is speaking to investors: “Do not worry. You can already go in and take it.”

Minerals: The Part They Cannot Yet Exploit

One thing foreign corporations have been forced to postpone—and I hope they never obtain it—is the exploitation of the rare-earth minerals, lithium and titanium about which Trump has spoken.

The principal lithium deposits include the Shevchenkivske deposit in Donetsk and Kruta Balka in the Zaporizhzhia region. These are either under Russian control or immediately beside the front line.

American corporations therefore cannot begin mining them. They lie within an active combat zone.

Meanwhile, Ukraine imagines that it is being terribly clever. Zelensky operates on the principle of “money in the morning, chairs in the evening”: he accepts money now in exchange for obligations that he may be unable to fulfil.

He signs over rights to minerals to obtain money for the war, although some of those minerals are now in Russian-controlled territory.

That is why Trump becomes angry and asks why Ukraine is not defending “its” assets. In effect, he is saying: “You must fight for these minerals. They belong to us now. If necessary, go and retake them yourselves.”

How Much Land Is Foreign-Controlled?

Official figures supposedly indicate that between 10 and 28 per cent of Ukraine’s arable land has passed under Western control.

In absolute terms, the Land Matrix database has been cited as estimating at least three to four million hectares. The principal investors are said to include funds or companies from the United States, Saudi Arabia and France.

Figures of 10 or 12 per cent are probably underestimates. The true proportion under foreign capital may be closer to 30 per cent.

The difference is concealed partly through offshore structures. Major Ukrainian agricultural holdings, such as UkrLandFarming and Kernel, manage enormous areas but may be legally registered in Luxembourg, Austria or Cyprus. Shares in these companies have been acquired over the years by international investors and corporations such as Cargill.

Thus a company can still be called “Ukrainian” while much of its capital and effective control lies abroad.

And Then There Is China

I have saved the most amusing part until last: China.

Ukrainian propaganda is always astonishingly good at redirecting attention. For years I have seen Ukrainians commenting that Russia has been completely sold to China.

When I first encountered this claim, I could not even understand what they meant. Russia does not have a domestic narrative of that kind. There are claims that Chinese companies lease Russian forests and cut down trees, and some of that certainly occurs. But forests are a renewable resource and the logged areas are replanted. I once worked for the Forestry Committee myself; we travelled out and planted trees.

The claim is therefore a manipulation.

It turns out that it is not Russia but Ukraine which has entered into remarkably far-reaching obligations to China. The Ukrainian authorities redirect attention towards Russia so that Ukrainians will not examine what has happened in their own country.

In 2013, under Yanukovych, Ukraine and China were reported to have concluded what Western newspapers called the largest agricultural agreement in history.

China’s state-owned Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps was said to have arranged the long-term use of as much as three million hectares of Ukrainian land, principally in the Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson regions, for 50 years.

That is almost nine per cent of all Ukraine’s arable land.

The purpose was reportedly to grow grain and raise pigs for the Chinese domestic market. China would invest billions, modernise irrigation and control a substantial part of the resulting supply through long-term agreements.

The Three-Billion-Dollar “Corn Debt”

The most extraordinary part is Ukraine’s three-billion-dollar corn arrangement with China—and in this case neither Russia nor the present war created the original problem.

Under the agreement, Ukraine undertook to supply China with millions of tonnes of corn and other grain annually for 15 years.

Ukraine received Chinese financing, but owing to corruption and the behaviour of Ukrainian officials, much of the money simply vanished and the promised deliveries were not made.

Imagine picking a fight with China! What were they thinking?

China naturally pursued its claims, and Ukraine was left with an enormous state-guaranteed liability. During the war, Ukraine has had to continue dealing with this debt and its associated grain obligations.

So while a war is being fought, Ukraine must supply grain under a long-term arrangement connected to money borrowed years earlier.

China also obtained a strong position in Ukrainian grain logistics, including facilities at the port of Mykolaiv. Chinese-associated operators consequently gained influence over what grain was exported and where it travelled.

Ukraine’s obligation to China has become a financial and strategic noose.

Reports indicate enormous losses at Ukraine’s State Food and Grain Corporation, while the weakening hryvnia makes the foreign-currency debt ever more burdensome. Ukraine has struggled to pay even the interest, without substantially reducing the principal.

The agreement was written very much to Beijing’s advantage. Ukraine was expected to supply several million tonnes of grain annually under pricing and purchasing arrangements favourable to China.

Instead of freely selling all that grain to Europe or the Middle East—where Ukraine desperately needs the revenue—it must satisfy its Chinese obligations.

After port logistics collapsed during the war, deliveries became physically difficult and additional liabilities accumulated. Kyiv then had to devote considerable diplomatic effort to persuading Beijing to restructure the debt.

The arrangement has reportedly been extended towards 2027, but the burden remains.

It is also a geopolitical humiliation. The debt limits Kyiv’s freedom to criticise China for supporting Russia.

And, while Ukraine suffers losses connected with the arrangement, China is perfectly capable of buying corn elsewhere. It may not urgently need Ukrainian corn at all—but a contractual entitlement is a contractual entitlement, and China will take what it is owed.

The Dollar and the Loss of Sovereignty

There is one final irony.

Ukrainians constantly appear beneath Russian TikTok videos laughing because Russian prices are quoted in roubles.

I may simply mention that something costs a certain number of roubles, because I make videos for a Russian audience. Ukrainians then arrive with passive-aggressive remarks: “What is this? Don’t you have dollars?”

But what has happened to them? They have become like a country whose inflation is so severe that its own currency no longer performs its proper function.

We Russians remember the 1990s, when prices could change during the course of a single day and expensive goods were marked in “conventional units”—meaning dollars.

When apartments, cars and major purchases can no longer be discussed in the national currency, that is not evidence that you have joined some sophisticated global system. It means your own currency has ceased to function as a dependable measure of value.

Yet these fools celebrate the fact that everything is priced in dollars. They do not understand that it shows how completely they have placed themselves under the American financial system.

A Brief Thank You

Finally, I want to thank you for your donations.

I am filming this on my Honor Magic6 Pro. You donated about 15,000 roubles during the month. The telephone cost more than that, of course, but I added my earnings and bought it.

So now I look wonderfully sharp!

At least I do on the telephone. We shall see what happens when I upload the video, because YouTube reduces the quality, and the editing program reduces it too.

But for the moment I like it.

Send more donations, and I shall buy something else.

Synopsis

The speaker’s central argument is that foreign control of Ukraine need not take the form of foreigners directly purchasing agricultural land. It can be achieved indirectly through:

• extremely long land-use and lease agreements;
• loans secured against shares, leases and productive assets;
• the purchase of distressed corporate debt;
• bankruptcy and debt restructuring;
• acquisition of agricultural companies, elevators, processing plants and export terminals;
• conversion of agricultural land to industrial, logistical or energy uses.

War, in her account, accelerates this process by destroying infrastructure, reducing company values and making Ukrainian businesses unable to service foreign-currency debts. Outside investors can consequently obtain strategically important assets cheaply before a peace settlement causes their value to recover.

She then turns to China. She claims China obtained a 50-year interest in three million hectares of Ukrainian farmland and describes Ukraine’s genuine 2012 loan-for-grain agreement with China as a debt trap that continues to burden the Ukrainian state.

Her broader conclusion is that Ukraine has retained the formal symbols of sovereignty while losing substantial economic control to Western capital, China and the dollar-centred financial system.

Commentary

There is a serious and valuable argument buried here, but Watermelons has combined it with several claims that do not withstand checking.

Her strongest point is the distinction between ownership and control. A foreign company does not have to possess the title to a field in order to control the economic product of that field. Long leases, corporate shareholdings, secured lending, processing facilities, storage, transport and access to ports can matter more than nominal ownership. Ukraine’s 2020 reform explicitly made agricultural land usable as collateral, while direct foreign ownership remains prohibited unless approved by a national referendum. World Bank account of the reform

Emphyteusis is also real: Ukrainian law recognises a transferable right to use another person’s land for agricultural purposes. But she exaggerates it into something approaching confiscation. It is a contractual property right, not a mysterious device automatically allowing foreigners to take any land they please.

Her account of debt, bankruptcy and distressed-asset acquisition describes a perfectly genuine capitalist mechanism. War makes companies cheaper, weakens debtors and strengthens creditors. It is entirely reasonable to investigate who owns Ukrainian agricultural holdings, who holds their bonds, which assets secure their borrowing and who gains control during restructuring.

What she does not provide is the company-by-company evidence necessary to show that BlackRock, Vanguard or Blackstone have actually acquired Ukrainian farms, elevators and terminals through the sequence she describes. She moves from “this mechanism could work” to “this is what these named corporations have done” without demonstrating the intervening transactions. In particular, holding shares through an index fund is not the same thing as directing or beneficially owning a company’s physical assets.

The assertion that foreigners control 10–28 per cent—or perhaps 30 per cent—of all Ukrainian arable land also mixes several unlike categories: land ownership, leased land, land operated by Ukrainian companies with some foreign shareholders, and offshore registration. Those figures cannot responsibly be treated as interchangeable.

The clearest factual failure concerns China’s supposed 50-year lease of three million hectares. That story circulated internationally in September 2013, but KSG Agro promptly denied it. The company said the actual proposed cooperation concerned drip irrigation on approximately 3,000 hectares—not the lease or sale of three million hectares. Contemporary Reuters reporting recorded both the original claim and the company’s denial. Reuters report of the original claim, subsequent report of KSG Agro’s denial

The Chinese grain debt, by contrast, is substantially real, although her description distorts its terms. In 2012 China Eximbank established a contemplated $3 billion programme, but the operative grain-purchase loan was $1.5 billion; the additional $1.5 billion was intended for Chinese equipment and infrastructure projects and apparently was not fully drawn. The grain was not simply to be handed to China “free”: it was to be sold through supply contracts whose proceeds serviced the loan. The arrangement required very large deliveries and was badly managed, however, and the Ukrainian state eventually inherited the repayment burden as guarantor. Ukraine was still seeking restructuring in 2025. Detailed loan record, 2025 restructuring report

Her claim that China won an international arbitration ordering Ukraine to repay the debt in grain is not established by the sources I found. Reports of threatened Chinese proceedings appeared as early as 2014, but they do not prove the particular judgment she describes.

She also appears to confuse Ukraine’s State Food and Grain Corporation and its facilities with Chinese ownership of the Mykolaiv port. Contractual access to grain, or influence exerted through a creditor and trading relationship, is not the same as owning or “completely controlling” a port.

So I would separate the video into three layers:

1. The underlying insight is sound: legal ownership is not the only—or necessarily the most important—form of economic control.
2. The general mechanism is plausible and important: debt, collateral, bankruptcy, foreign shareholding and control of logistics can transfer the benefits of Ukrainian land abroad.
3. The purported proof is unreliable: the three-million-hectare Chinese lease was denied; the Western land-control percentages are insufficiently defined; and allegations concerning BlackRock, ports, green-energy land and mineral concessions are asserted without the transaction-level evidence needed to establish them.

This is characteristic of Watermelons at her most interesting and most hazardous. She sees the structural principle—the difference between the flag planted over an asset and the financial power governing it—very clearly. But once she has found a persuasive pattern, she tends to accept every item that appears to confirm it. In this case, that converts a worthwhile investigation into an overconfident story in which true mechanisms, genuine scandals, misunderstandings and old internet legends are presented with exactly the same degree of certainty.

Q:

So overall we have an informative and in context today a valuable piece from Watermelons? Accompanied by your critique we have something of substance.

A:

Yes—exactly. Taken together, they make something of real substance.

Watermelons supplies the valuable central insight: foreign control does not require foreign legal ownership. Control can pass through debt, collateral, leases, company shares, bankruptcy, processing facilities, transport corridors and export terminals. That is a genuinely important lens through which to examine Ukraine’s present and future.

Her weakness is evidentiary discipline. She discovers a real mechanism, then too readily treats every story that resembles it as proof that the mechanism has been used. The debunked Chinese three-million-hectare lease is the clearest example.

The critique does not destroy her argument. It removes the unreliable supporting material and narrows the conclusion to what can reasonably be maintained:

Ukraine’s land may not have been literally “sold to foreigners,” but substantial economic control over what the land produces—and over the companies, infrastructure, mineral rights and export routes surrounding it—can nevertheless be transferred through finance and contract.

That is more precise, more defensible and, arguably, more revealing than the sensational claim that foreigners simply “own Ukraine.”

So yes: Watermelons provides the perception, energy and investigative question; the critique supplies the necessary brakes and evidentiary distinctions. Together they form a valuable examination of how modern economic sovereignty can be lost without any conspicuous transfer of territory or title deeds.

Q:

There is a significant claim she makes – that ‘they do not want the war to end’.

A:

Yes. And it is more significant than her claim that Ukraine is being bought up, because it moves from describing exploitation of the war to alleging an interest in its continuation.

There are really three propositions:

1. Some parties benefit from the war.
   Undoubtedly true. Arms manufacturers receive orders; financial institutions obtain advisory and investment opportunities; distressed assets become cheaper; governments acquire strategic leverage.
2. Some parties take advantage of conditions created by the war.
   Also highly plausible. Ukraine’s desperation, indebtedness and dependence weaken its bargaining position. Agreements that would meet resistance in peacetime can be presented during an emergency as indispensable.
3. Those parties therefore do not want the war to end.
   Possible—but not proved merely by the first two propositions.

That final inference is where we must be exact. A person can profit from a fire without having started it or wanting it to continue. But if his profits depend upon the fire continuing—and if he has influence over whether it is extinguished—then the question becomes entirely legitimate.

Watermelons identifies a genuine conflict of interest: the people deciding whether the war should continue may not bear its costs, while some institutions surrounding them benefit from its continuation. Ukrainians supply the lives, territory and ruined infrastructure; weapons producers receive contracts; creditors obtain leverage; governments expand military budgets and alliances; and investors position themselves for reconstruction and privileged access.

There is already documentary substance behind part of this picture. In November 2022, while the destruction was continuing, BlackRock formally agreed to help Ukraine design an investment framework through which public and private capital could participate in reconstruction. Ukraine described BlackRock’s advisory work as pro bono, but the arrangement plainly demonstrates that the organisation of post-war investment opportunities began during the war—not after it. BlackRock’s announcement, Ukrainian government announcement

By the end of 2025, the officially estimated reconstruction requirement had reached approximately US$588 billion. That represents an enormous prospective field of contracts, loans, concessions and investments. World Bank reconstruction assessment

But there is an important complication: many ordinary investors would actually prefer the war to end. Peace reduces political risk, makes assets more valuable, allows construction to proceed and makes returns more predictable. A reconstruction investor may want to secure favourable terms during the war but want peace once those terms are secured. An arms manufacturer’s incentives may be quite different. “The West” is not one economic mind.

So the strongest defensible version of Watermelons’ claim is not:

The West collectively started the war and deliberately prolongs it to seize Ukraine.

It is:

Powerful interests exist for which continuation of the war brings money, strategic advantage or negotiating leverage. Because some of those interests can influence decisions about peace, their role and incentives deserve close scrutiny.

And there is a still darker possibility. Certain actors may not want war forever, but they may prefer the war to continue until the desired political, military or commercial arrangements have been secured. In other words:

They may want peace—but only after the war has produced the settlement, dependencies and ownership structure they want.

That is, I think, the formidable question Watermelons has reached. She has not proved it. But she has certainly identified something that cannot be dismissed by saying, “There is no evidence BlackRock owns Ukrainian soil.” The issue is much larger: who benefits from continuing the war, who possesses the power to prolong it, and who would lose influence, income or bargaining power if peace arrived tomorrow?