Actually less than a half of the financial assistance promised to Ukraine by the West has reached Kiev, analysts of the Kiel Institute of World Economy have found out, the Financial Times newspaper reported on Tuesday, February 21.
Ukraine’s Finance Ministry has received €31 billion of the €64 billion by December 2022, the study found.
“There is a problem with the payments, consisting in the fact that they are unsustainable, delayed and unstable,” Timofey Milovanov, founder of the Kyiv School of Economics and advisor in the Ukrainian presidential administration, explained the reason of the problem.
The EU and the European Investment Bank have jointly promised a total of nearly €30 billion from February 2022, the largest share of Western budget support for Ukraine. However, €17.5 billion of this amount has not yet arrived in Kiev.
According to Milovanov, last summer the situation was the worst – a lot was promised, but the implementation was minimal.
Last November the EU revised the structure of its bailout package and promised “regular and predictable financial assistance” of up to €18bn for 2023, or about €1.5bn a month.
Kiel Institute researcher Christoph Trebesch noted that it took the EU up to six months to get legal and political approval for a part of its financial support.
Earlier, on 20 February, the Pentagon reported that the total amount of military assistance provided to Ukraine by the USA exceeded $30bn.