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LONDON — Britain convened a two-day conference of donors starting on Wednesday in London where it will pledge more than $3 billion in financial aid to rebuild war-torn Ukraine in the shadow of Kyiv’s counteroffensive against Russia.
After opening remarks by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine spoke by video, thanking conference attendees for their support. “You and I, right now, we are able to protect life,” he said, adding that “the world is watching to see if we will restore normal life.”
The British package, which includes 240 million pounds ($305 million) of additional direct economic assistance and $3 billion in World Bank loan guarantees, is intended to encourage an influx of new public and private pledges to reconstruct Ukrainian cities and towns destroyed by Russian troops.
The United States will also announce a “robust” new economic aid package, according to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who is attending the conference along with representatives of more than 50 countries. He met Tuesday with Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, but did not disclose details of the American package.
Mr. Blinken said Ukraine would need to undertake economic and political reforms “to build the best possible environment to attract that investment.” The Biden administration has delivered $26.4 billion of economic aid to Ukraine since the war started, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Britain, which is one of the largest providers of military aid to the Ukrainian Army, is leveraging London’s status as a global center of finance and insurance to stimulate foreign investment. The $3 billion in loan guarantees extends over three years, the government said, and is backed by more than 400 companies from 38 countries, including Sanofi, Phillips, and Hyundai Engineering.
In Brussels, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said the commission would ask the bloc’s members to approve 50 billion euros ($54.58 billion) to rebuild Ukraine, to be distributed between 2024 and 2027. About 17 billion euros would come in grants and the rest in the form of low-interest loans, officials said. It may face hurdles getting approval from all 27 members of the European Union.
Rebuilding Ukraine’s shattered infrastructure will cost more than $400 billion, according to economists and Ukrainian officials. That sum is so enormous that it has prompted calls to use the estimated $300 billion in Russian assets frozen in the European Union, the United States, Switzerland, and Britain to defray the cost.
Although fighting is still raging across southern and eastern Ukraine, analysts said it was important to start planning the postwar rebuilding process now, to avoid the kind of delays that dogged the reconstruction of Europe after World War II.
“Without any kind of planning, these delays can mount, and they can lead to human misery and to failure of economies and to basically foreign policy failures,” Howard Shatz, a senior economist at RAND Corporation, said to reporters last week. “So it is important to start planning now.”
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