Last week I was in Mariupol, which I had been meaning to visit for some time. It is Ukraine’s easternmost large city that is within the control of the national authorities. Getting, there is not easy. As the local airport is closed, one needs to fly to Zaporizhzhia, drive for four hours, and pass a few military checkpoints. After all, the dividing line between those areas under Ukrainian control and those under separatist control is just a few dozen kilometers away.
The city, located 785 kilometers southeast of Kyiv on the Azov Sea, is strategic for Ukraine. Its two large steel plants account for 10 percent of the exports of the country. Three years ago, shelling was a constant risk but the dividing line has receded and the situation has considerably quieted down.
Circumstances remain objectively difficult: the population, 500,000 before the conflict, has grown by another 100,000, a strain on infrastructure. Water supply has been interrupted and replacement sources have had to be identified in a hurry. The logistics remain daunting, including in seafaring traffic. The economic leadership of the Donbas region has unexpectedly been bestowed on that hard-working provincial city. How does one accommodate a new university in an emergency? Let alone three? And clients, especially export clients, of the local companies are of course wary of committing to a supplier in what could become a precarious location.
But there is a bright spot. The mayor and city administration have set out to defy these formidable odds and build a new city on the sea, a city that combines industry, the sea and a smile.
Visiting TeraWatt Group, a private sector client which we support through the EU4Business programme, offers a glimpse of that future. The company, a small business, specializes in command and control systems for industrial plants that employ hundreds of times more people. It has secured recognition from global giants such as Rockwell Automation or Schneider Electric. Andrey Kalantarenko, the owner, proudly showed us a remote control that looks like an overgrown Nintendo console, from which one can steer an entire casting machine, a monster of technology and industry. He points to the large flat screen in the conference room. “For one of our large clients in the metals industry we built a control panel that we built, assembling 27 such screens into one large display.”
Mayor Vadym Boychenko does understand the responsibility that comes with this new economic leadership. He is proud to announce that the famous Shakhtar Donetsk football club, which was looking for a new home, having played in Lviv for a while, has agreed to settle in Mariupol, the closest there is from where its heart is still beating. He sends us to visit control centers, one dealing with security, another with traffic regulation. They are state of the art.
Certainly there is a heightened risk in this part of Ukraine, but the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is the international financial institution that knows Ukraine best, and probably more than others understands the strategic importance of investing in that city. We know we can make a difference.
We have decided to start small, with a trolleybus project that we will bring to our board before summer. Lines are saturated and the equipment is old. New trolleybuses will not only offer the low floors that make them accessible, they will also feature a much-reduced energy consumption, in addition to the WiFi access and GPS tracking that the city has already begun implementing in its fleet. The business plan is under preparation; conditions have been discussed, we are progressing well. But the mayor has other ideas in mind: he wants us to help invest in district heating, water supply and wastewater treatment, energy efficiency in public buildings, tramway rehabilitation, and much else. In true EBRD fashion, we will look at the best relevant way to support while keeping our risk acceptably low and getting the best impact for the bank’s money.
A green, inclusive, competitive, well-governed Mariupol will be a beacon when the time comes to rebuild Donbas.
