About the author

The panel is written by Dmytro Voronenko. I live and work in Singapore. Ukrainian and Russian are my first languages and I use English daily: which is why the panel exists in all three, and why I read Russian primary sources without a translator standing between me and the text.

My career began at the National Bank of Ukraine during the introduction of the hryvnia, where I worked as a software developer. It was an unusually intense year of reform and institutional change, long enough for me to see how a central bank operates from the inside and to work across different departments. Since then, I have continued to work with central banks and their departments, but from the other side of the table: running companies and building decision and risk management systems for banks rather than automating a central bank from within.

After that, a PhD in AI and a long run co-founding and running financial technology companies across regulated markets, and on government agency projects in Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States. Underneath it was always the same work: risk, complex systems, and the second-order effects of decisions with too many variables. Deciding under constraint when the number that determines the outcome is not the number being reported.

Russian war finance is that problem at its worst, because the party doing the reporting has the strongest interest in how it reads. The binding quantity has to be rebuilt from things that leave marks: a payment made, an indexation set, a liability moved onto somebody else’s balance sheet.

I am Ukrainian. I am not neutral about this war and nothing here should be read as if I were. Read me carefully rather than not at all, and look at how the panel is built. Falsification conditions and check dates go up before the dates arrive. Forward-looking assessments are not rewritten afterwards; a miss stays a miss. Anything that cuts against my own argument is published first. You do not have to take my word for any of it — the record is there.

I receive no funding for this work and hold no affiliation with any government, party or organisation with a stake in its conclusions.

One thing rests on judgment I cannot verify: the order of the rungs, meaning which payer gives way before which. It is argued from the political economy of authoritarian regimes and from decisions Russia has already taken. It is not measured. Argue with it and I will take the argument seriously; if it holds, the panel gets rebuilt on it.

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