By COLlive reporter
In the midst of a public health and financial crisis, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky launched a new campaign designed to transform the country’s image and attract international investors.
In a video released in honor of Ukraine’s Independence Day, Zelensky, a former actor and comedian, presented Ukraine as “a place where you can still make real discoveries; a frontier where new things are happening.”
The video is the first in a series of a “What Is Ukraine Now” themed campaign, which has rabbis and Jewish community leaders excited about its prospects.
In the video, Zelensky addresses concerns that have kept international investors away from Ukraine in recent years, specifically, its war with Russia. By describing Ukraine as “green, peaceful and open,” Zelensky refers to his fulfilled campaign promise to disengage troops and implement a ceasefire in East Ukraine. The ceasefire agreement was reached in July following the Normandy Contact Group meeting at the end of last year, which brought Zelensky and Vladimir Putin together for the first time.
VIDEO: The president’s campaign video
Despite a shrinking economy, Zelensky highlighted two of the country’s strongest industries, agriculture, and high-tech. In May, his administration passed a historic land reform bill that allows Ukrainian citizens to own, buy, and sell land, and is one of his biggest political achievements to date. Referring to Ukraine as “Europe’s breadbasket,” Zelensky encouraged investment, he said, that will “help us feed the world.”
Ukraine is also known as a tech hub with an IT industry that attracts many international corporations, and which accounts for 3.3% of its GDP, a growth of more than 50 times in just five years. “Ukraine is the world’s newest tech hub,” explains Zelensky in the video. “We have famous startups, brilliant engineers, dynamic entrepreneurs, and a low 5% tax rate for IT businesses.”
Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetzky, Chief Rabbi of Dnipro who build the world’s largest Jewish community center in his city, is happily participating in the efforts to show the positive image of the country.
“I came to Ukraine 30 years ago and everyone was telling me how can you go to such an anti-Semitic place with such bad history,” he said in a recent interview with the i24news channel.
“Everything is changing,” he said under the current president, who is Jewish. “This country was friendly to Jewish people. Now it’s becoming business-friendly, and tourist-friendly.”
Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine in 2019 with a landslide victory that captured nearly 75 percent of the vote. Later that year, Zelensky’s party, Servant of the People, won a solid majority in Ukraine’s parliament for the first time in the country’s modern history. Ukraine’s economy has been hit hard as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, with a projected decrease of 8 percent GDP, an 8.7 percent inflation rate, and 9.5%. unemployment rate.
VIDEO: Rabbi Kaminetzky comments on it
