Euromaidan protesters took to Kyiv’s streets last year in the hopes of Ukraine’s becoming part of the European Union. The Europe they admired was one of material comforts and living standards far beyond the reach of most Ukrainians, whose average income is about the level of El Salvadorans’. The demonstrators wanted for themselves something approaching Europe’s prosperity — a market economy, advanced technology, quality public transportation, universal health care, adequate pensions and paid vacations that average five weeks.

If they are fortunate enough to avoid war, Ukrainians may be in for an unpleasant surprise as their current and even soon-to-be-elected leaders negotiate their economic future with their new, unelected European deciders. The Europe of their near and intermediate future may be more like Greece’s or Spain’s — but with less than a third of their per capita income and with a small fraction of those countries’ now shrunken social safety nets.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has announced that one of the conditions of its lending to Kyiv (along with that of the EU and U.S.) will be fiscal austerity for the next two and a half years. Ukraine’s economy is already in recession, with the IMF projecting a steep 5 percent decline in GDP for 2014. The danger is that this fiscal tightening could become a moving target as the economy and therefore tax revenues shrink further and the government has to cut even more spending to meet the IMF’s deficit goals. This downward spiral is what happened in Greece, where an adjustment that the European authorities could have accomplished relatively easily and painlessly turned into a six-year recession that has cost Greece a quarter of its national income and left 27.5 percent of the labor force out of work.

Is this scenario unlikely? Consider German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble’s comments to the press last month that Greece could serve as a model for Ukraine. This is like saying that the United States’ Great Depression could serve as a model for Ukraine.

But we don’t have to look to Greece or Spain to see the risks of signing on to a program of fiscal austerity and reforms run by the IMF and its European directors. Ukraine has had its own recent experience to draw on: In just four years, from 1992 to 1996, Ukraine lost half of its GDP as the IMF and friends took the wrecking ball to both the Russian and Ukrainian economies. Ukraine’s economy didn’t start growing again until the 2000s. For comparison, the worst years of the U.S. Great Depression (1929 to 1934) saw a real GDP loss of 36 percent.