The Ukrainian government this week announced that on April 28 it will finally host a long-delayed event that had been billed as an international donors' conference to raise billions of dollars for Ukraine's ailing economy and help rebuild the war-torn eastern Donbas.
However, Russia’s war is not over and international donors are hard to find.
So the government has jettisoned the term “donor.”
The event is now being billed as the International Support For Ukraine Conference, to be held in Kyiv one day after the city hosts a high-profile European Union-Ukraine summit. It is not expected to lure in the $1.5 billion estimated minimum that officials claim is needed to overhaul the destroyed infrastructure in the war zone.
“The name of the conference and the dates have been changing several times, as we kept negotiating with our international partners,” Aivaras Abromavicius, Ukraine’s economic minister, told an April 15 press conference.
Abromavicius also stressed that raising money is not an immediate aim of the conference.
“It’s a fragile cease-fire now, so it’ wasn’t possible to estimate how much financial and technical aid is needed,” he said.
He confirmed that senior EU officials visiting for the summit are going to remain in Kyiv an extra day next week to attend the conference. Abromavicius said he expects at least 400 guests, including representatives of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund. Other dignitaries to attend include European Council President Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker.
Since last summer, Kyiv has repeatedly called upon countries around the world to join the donor initiative for Ukraine, but Abromavicius could provide no names about which specific country representatives will attend.
He said that Ukraine’s government, in place since late last year, will use the event to showcase achievements and commitments to potential donors.
“Now we have some results, as the parliament has summed up their first 100 days of work,” since being elected last autumn, he added.
Abromavicius said the onging war forced the government to lower its hopes for the event.
Russia’s war, which has claimed more than 6,000 lives, has made it difficult for Ukraine to estimate its financial needs. Having secured a $17.5 billion fresh bailout from the International Monetary Fund in February, Ukraine is not in need of emergency financing.
Some are skeptical about the conference’s purpose.
Oleh Soskin, director of the Kyiv-based Institute of Society Transformation, describes Kyiv’s hopes for winning over donors and investors any time soon as “utopian.”
As the West and Kyiv struggle to convince Russia and their proxies in eastern Ukraine to call of the war, Soskin says that Kyiv’s government will struggle in coming weeks to negotiate with foreign creditors in order to free up $15 billion in by restructuring sovereign and quasi-sovereign Eurobonds.
“It’s like the Minsk agreements … there are negotiations under way, but no result,” he says, referring to the planned conference on April 28.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]
