Delegations from at least 40 countries, international organizations and business representatives will discuss the main principles of the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine at a conference that opens on Monday in Lugano, Switzerland.
Agence France-Presse notes that the conference will not be devoted directly to fundraising. Its participants will try to work out the basic principles and priorities for reconstruction, which must begin even before the war is over. We are talking about a new “Marshall Plan” – by analogy with the program for the restoration of Europe after the Second World War.
Ukraine is represented at the conference by Prime Minister Denys Shmikhal and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will take part in the forum via video link. Among others, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is taking part in the conference.
To finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, according to AFP sources, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development intends to create a new fund. It can collect about 100 billion euros from EU members and other countries of the world.
According to the Kyiv School of Economics, about 45 million square meters of building space, 256 enterprises, 656 medical institutions and 1,177 educational institutions were destroyed in the country. The school experts estimated the damage to the Ukrainian economy at $600 billion.
At the end of May, Oleg Ustenko, an adviser to the President of Ukraine, said that the damage to the country’s economy from the Russian invasion already reaches one trillion dollars, of which 650 billion are direct losses.
In the US and EU countries, there are initiatives to compensate for a significant part of these losses at the expense of Russia. In particular, it is proposed to use for this the frozen assets of the Russian Central Bank (about $300 billion), the funds of Russian businessmen and officials who fell under the sanctions, and to impose additional taxes on the purchase of Russian resources.