U.S. corporate land grab in Ukraine underlies war with Russia

In early November, Barbara Bonte, a Belgian member of the European Union (EU) parliament, raised concern about the sell-off of Ukrainian land on a massive scale to U.S. private equity firms along with some Saudi agro-industrial and investment businesses.

Bonte wrote to the EU parliament that,

according to several disquieting reports, mainly U.S. but also Saudi agro-industrial and investment businesses are purchasing Ukrainian farmland on a massive scale. Cargill, ADM, BlackRock, Oaktree Capital Management and Bunge Limited, for instance, have reportedly gained control over much of Ukraine’s farmland.

Bonte then posed two questions to the EU parliament as follows:

1. What is the Commission’s assessment of the impact of this sell-off of European farmland to multinationals serving only U.S. interests on EU strategic food-supply dependence? How does the Commission intend to address that impact?”
2. This strongly suggests that the United States is seeking to recoup its military support for Ukraine, and ensure a geopolitical presence there in a post-war scenario through control over Ukrainian farmland and the profits it generates. How does the Commission intend to prevent the United States from cherry-picking in Ukraine and Europe from being left to deal with just the handicaps?”

Bonte’s questions are significant ones that point to a hidden, underlying motive to the war in Ukraine and U.S. and European support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The bonanza offered to foreign investors resembles past wars where young people were sacrificed on the altar of corporate profits.

War and Theft

A detailed analysis of the land grab in Ukraine by Western corporations was provided in a 2023 report by the Oakland Institute¹ entitled “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land.”

Written by Frédéric Mousseau, a food security consultant, and Eve Devillers, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, the report starts by emphasizing Ukraine’s function as a “breadbasket of Europe” with its 33 million acres of arable land and “large swaths of the most fertile farmland in the world.”

In 2021, Zelensky initiated a land reform program as part of the structural adjustment program begun under the auspices of Western financial institutions that enabled U.S.-based corporations to take over Ukraine’s land.²

The structural adjustment program had been opposed by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown in the 2014 U.S.-backed Maidan coup.

After Zelensky’s “land reform” was initiated, about five million hectares—the size of two Crimeas—were outright “stolen” by private interests.

The thieves included Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street investment firm well represented in the Biden administration, which in April 2022 bought NN Investment Partners Holding N.V., a Netherlands-based company that is a major shareholder in Ukraine’s biggest landowner, Kernel Holding S.A, and in Astarta, another large landowner in Ukraine.³

[Source: labourheartlands.com]

Vanguard Group Inc., which gave $45,473 to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and $98,551 to Joe Biden in 2020, was another Wall Street firm that bought up Ukrainian land cheaply.⁴

[Source: newsmax.com]

Some large U.S. pension funds, foundations and university endowments are invested in Ukrainian land through NCH Capital—a U.S.-based private equity fund headquartered at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, which is the fifth largest landholder in Ukraine with its possession of 290,749 hectares.⁵

NCH Capital currently faces accusations of unlawful land acquisition, tax evasion, and illicit financial activity. In 2015, its founder and CEO, George Rohr, was part of the high-level meetings involving Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and U.S. Commerce secretary Penny Pritzker that led Ukraine to agree to the structural adjustment program of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a condition for two $1 billion loan guarantees from the Obama administration.⁶

Congressman Jimmy Panetta, right, shaking hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in August 2024. [Source: sanluisobispo.com]

Congressman Jimmy Panetta, right, meeting with Ukrainian soldier in August 2024. [Source: sanluisobispo.com]

Investors in NCH Capital include Dow Chemical, notorious manufacturer of napalm and Agent Orange, as well as other war profiteers like Honeywell and Lockheed Martin, along with Harvard University, the University of Michigan and Wellesley College endowments.

Open Secrets.com reports that NCH Capital has given the most money to Democratic Party candidates who have been fervent champions of U.S. intervention in Ukraine and billion-dollar military and financial aid packages there.

In 2024, NCH Capital gave $5,000 to Jimmy Panetta, a Democratic representative from California’s 19^th congressional district encompassing Santa Cruz, Monterey and San José, who is a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer and the son of former CIA Director Leon Panetta (who delivered a keynote address at this year’s Democratic Party Convention in Chicago).⁷

Not surprisingly, Jimmy Panetta has been a champion of “robust aid to Ukraine in Congress,” as a profile in The San Luis Obispo Tribune put it, helping to pass a national security package that included $61 billion in security aid for Ukraine and support for the sale of seized Russian assets.⁸

In August 2024, Panetta traveled to Ukraine to meet with Zelensky. He subsequently issued a statement praising him and claiming that it was “heartening to see and hear firsthand how American support, especially our work in Congress to pass legislation for supplemental funding, is properly being used on the battlefield.”

Ukrainian farmers protest privatization laws imposed by Volodymyr Zelensky at the behest of the IMF. [Source: euromaidanpress.com]

NCH and other firms investing in Ukrainian agriculture are indebted to Western financial institutions, in particular the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC)—the private sector arm of the World Bank.

The Oakland Institute report compares the generous financing of multinational corporations and local oligarchs with the inability of Ukrainian small farmers to access loans and their being displaced from their land and plunged into poverty. Some have migrated to the U.S. to seek farm work in the U.S. Midwest, sending remittances back home.⁹

Mousseau and Devillers wrote that “the Partial Credit Guarantee Fund established by the World Bank to support small farmers is only US$5.4 million, a negligible amount compared to the billions channeled to large agribusinesses.”

Mousseau and Devillers further emphasized that the billions in Western aid provided to Ukraine have been “conditioned to a drastic structural adjustment program, which includes austerity measures, cuts in social safety nets, and the privatization of key sectors of the economy.”¹⁰

A central condition [of Western aid] was “the creation of a land market, put into law in 2020 under President Zelensky, despite opposition from a majority of Ukrainians fearing that it will exacerbate corruption in the agricultural sector and reinforce its control by powerful interests”—which indeed it has.¹¹

Mousseau and Devillers suggest that international financial institutions, by supporting large agribusinesses, are “in effect subsidizing [with the concentration of land] an industrial model of agriculture based on the intensive use of synthetic inputs, fossil fuels, and large-scale monocropping—long shown to be environmentally and socially destructive.

By contrast, small-scale farmers in Ukraine being driven off their land, “demonstrate resilience and a great potential for leading the expansion of a different production model based on agro-ecology, environmental sustainability, and the production of healthy food.”

At the end, “War and Theft” makes clear there are post-reconstruction plans for further land privatization that will benefit the same corporate investors who are already making a huge profit in Ukraine.

This is happening as an overwhelming number of Ukrainians want to suspend the land privatization laws enforced by the Zelensky government, whose image in the West is a phony one.

Notes:

1. ↩ The Oakland Institute is an independent policy think tank based in Oakland, California.
2. ↩ “War and Theft” emphasizes that misguided privatization and corrupt governance since the early 1990s in Ukraine led to the concentration of land in the hands of a new oligarchic class and a variety of foreign interests, including U.S.-based private equity funds and the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia which registered in tax havens such as Cyprus and Luxembourg.
3. ↩ Then-Vice President Joe Biden blackmailed Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko by threatening to withhold the $1 billion IMF loans if he did not fire a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, a natural gas company that appointed Joe’s son Hunter to its Board even though he had no experience working in the oil and gas industry. A firm based in Tampa, Florida, with $4.97 billion in U.S. assets, Kopernik Global Investors, LLC also owns shares in Kernel and Astarta.
4. ↩ In the 2020 election cycle, Vanguard gave $13,573 to Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who has been supportive of Ukraine’s position in the conflict with Russia. In 2022, it gave $11,370 to Senator Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat who is another Ukraine war hawk, and $8,149 to John Fetterman (D-PA) who supported Ukraine aid packages. When Russia began its special military operation in February 2022, Vanguard issued a public statement denouncing Putin and conveying its solidarity with Ukraine.
5. ↩ According to “War and Theft,” NCH operates in Ukraine through the company AgroProsperis.
6. ↩ NCH Capital was founded in 1993 by George Rohr and Moris Tabacinic, two U.S. businessmen heavily involved in the privatization frenzy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. They established a series of funds to lease or buy farms in the region at a low price, with the aim to aggregate them into large-scale grain and soybean farms—successfully amassing a land bank of 700,000 hectares in Ukraine and Russia. After securing investments from prominent Western financial institutions, NCH Capital channeled these funds through offshore companies located in tax havens like Cyprus and the Cayman Islands and into joint ventures with local firms to take over the land.
7. ↩ The main Republican to which NCH Capital gave substantial money in the 2024 election cycle was Roger Wicker (R-MS), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who promoted the surging of faster military aid to Ukraine and advocated for a nuclear weapon strike on Russia. NCH Capital gave $1,000 to Ritchie Torres (D-NY), a House member from the Bronx who voted in favor of three supplemental military aid packages to Ukraine. He said: “The U.S. has a singular obligation to help freedom fighters fight for their freedom, and nowhere more so than in Ukraine, whose self-defense against Putin’s aggression must prevail.” NCH Capital gave $500 to Congressman Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), a Clinton protégé who was another supporter of military funding to Ukraine.
8. ↩ Panetta also authored and introduced the bipartisan, bicameral Ukraine Human Rights Policy Act to hold Russia accountable for its human rights abuses, and co-sponsored the NO LIMITS Act, which would hold Chinese Communist Party military firms providing assistance to Russia’s war efforts accountable, and he continues to fight for a resolution that strongly condemns the forced adoption of Ukrainian children by the Russian Federation and calls for the return of Ukrainian children to their home country and families.
9. ↩ Goldman Sachs officials from London, with investments in Ukraine’s agriculture, have meanwhile been seen sporting cowboy boots and hats visiting their holdings.
10. ↩ The austerity measures included slashing public pensions and wages, reforming the public provision of water and energy, and the privatization of banks and other facets of Ukraine’s economy. These policies have resulted in Ukraine assuming a crippling debt burden.
11. ↩ The report notes that, in 2019 and 2020, large protests and rallies erupted against changes to laws governing the sale of farmland.