The money to rebuild Ukraine is being lined up behind public guarantees. Most of it moves only once Russia’s war has finally come to an end.
Dominykas Tuckus had a figure to share. On June 25, at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdansk, the Amber Infrastructure executive said the European Flagship Fund for the Reconstruction of Ukraine had gathered roughly 260 million euros in commitments, 220 million of it first-loss equity from the European Commission and the development banks of France, Germany, Italy and Poland. Eugene Baranov of Dragon Capital, the fund’s co-manager and an investor in Kyiv for 25 years, said the rebuilding could not wait. Marta Kos, the European commissioner for enlargement, told delegates that nearly a thousand companies had come to Gdansk and that the interest was real.
It is real against a backdrop that swallows it. Anna Bjerde, the World Bank’s managing director of operations, in February put her name to the fifth joint assessment of the damage from Russia’s war on Ukraine. The repair bill it carried had climbed to almost 588 billion US dollars over a decade, close to three times the country’s 2025 output and up from 524 billion US dollars a year before. Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s prime minister, thanked the World Bank and EU teams and pressed on with repairs. Transport is now the single largest line, at over 96 billion US dollars, with energy and housing not far behind. The 260 million euros committed in Gdansk is roughly one two-thousandth of what the assessment says Ukraine needs.
The conference has become an annual fixture. Kos framed this year’s meeting in Gdansk as a way to anchor Ukraine inside the European Union, defence industry included. Its organisers set a target of about three billion euros in private capital, with security projects in the running for the first time. Each edition since Lugano in 2022 has added an instrument, from the war-risk framework agreed at London in 2023 to the recovery fund unveiled at Rome last year. This year’s vehicle is the fund Tuckus came to announce.
On the same day, Ajay Banga, the World Bank’s president, watched its guarantee arm and America’s Development Finance Corporation (DFC) sign a war-risk insurance mechanism for projects under a joint US-Ukraine fund. Banga said only the private sector could carry the rebuilding, since the public purse could not, and that the risk had to be cut down before it would come. Oleksiy Sobolev, Ukraine’s economy minister, noted that the World Bank’s agency had insured only a few Ukrainian projects directly until then, and said the new mechanism would extend the cover to others.
Phase two
Conor Coleman, the DFC’s chief of staff, told the Gdansk meeting that his agency would line up more private money beside the joint fund. The cover that the World Bank’s guarantee arm provides is staged: while the war continues it insures trade, bank lending and a few approved projects, and it holds back the larger war-risk policies until the fighting settles or stops. Little has been deployed against the need. The DFC’s Ukraine book had reached about 1.6 billion US dollars by mid-2025, and the IFC, the bank’s private arm, had pulled in some 970 million US dollars of blended finance by April 2026. Both sums are meant to draw in the hundreds of billions Ukraine still lacks.
Delegations from America, Ukraine and Russia met in Geneva for peace talks in February but ended abruptly without agreement, as they had in Abu Dhabi weeks earlier, over the future of the Donbas. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in December that 90 per cent of a deal was agreed, though the part left open, which territory Ukraine would cede, has not moved since. Donald Trump had wanted a settlement by June, as Zelensky reported in February, and the month has all but ended without one. Zelensky himself stayed away from Gdansk after a quarrel with Poland’s president, Karol Nawrocki, over a Ukrainian military unit named for a wartime insurgent army, leaving Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa to make his case.
Norfund, Norway’s development financier, has already put 10 million US dollars into warehousing near Lviv, and Meest, a delivery firm, is building a 30 million US dollars logistics hub in the west. Dragon Capital, Baranov’s own house, has placed close to 200 million euros inside Ukraine since the 2022 invasion, part of 1.2 billion US dollars since 2000. Oleksii Kuleba, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for reconstruction, brought 530 investment projects to Gdansk, with a first batch of public-private deals in transport and housing.
Claudia Martinez Ochoa of Proparco confirmed France’s 15 million euros, one of five public anchors in the first-loss tranche the fund hopes private money will follow. The guarantee arm’s war-risk cover at full scale begins, by its own rules, only when the fighting stops. At the time of writing, it had not.
Photo: Dreamstime.