Ukraine plans for its future even as the war rages on

Even as Ukraine still grinds its way inch by inch through a bloody counteroffensive against the Russians in its occupied south and east, the country has an eye on the rebuilding afterwards of its economy and infrastructure.

The Ukraine Recovery Conference, jointly hosted with the UK government in London on Wednesday and Thursday, brings together international policymakers and, crucially, the private investors who will help to fund the country’s economic and social reconstruction if it can throw off the yoke of invasion.

The damage to Ukraine from the Russian invasion is measured not just in the tens of thousands of lives that have been lost. The country’s economy also shrunk by at least 29 per cent last year, forcing swathes of its population into poverty and leaving it reliant on international help to function. Private and public investment in Ukraine cannot come too soon for it.

Political leaders from all over Europe, including the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, are due to attend the conference, along with global bankers and civil society groups. US secretary of state Antony Blinken is also in London for the event.

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The Ukraine Recovery Conference has its roots in the pre-war Ukraine Reform Conference, which was to plan the country’s economic overhaul and was first held in London in 2017 – Boris Johnson was deeply involved as foreign secretary. Further conferences were held in Copenhagen in 2018, Toronto in 2019, Vilnius in 2021 before the 2022 conference in Lugano in Switzerland in July last year morphed into a recovery conference, following the outbreak of war.

Official details of this week’s event at a riverside location in London remain sketchy for security reasons, but the opening keynote address to the conference will be delivered by Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy is also expected to dial in.

Conference sessions over the two days will focus on issues such as defining the scale of what Ukraine needs; reforms required of its economy to drive long-term growth; rebuilding its energy sector; training its workers; and building its tech sector.

[ Ukraine one year on: ‘Why should I leave my home, my world, my country?’ ]

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak will also give an address, in which he will call Ukraine a “vibrant, dynamic, creative European country that refuses to be subdued”, according to remarks trailed by officials from Downing Street.

“As we’ve seen in Bakhmut and Mariupol, what Russia cannot take it will seek to destroy. They want to do the same to Ukraine’s economy,” Sunak is due to warn.

It is expected that Sunak will announce a further package of financial supports for Ukraine, including $3 billion (€2.75 billion) of loan guarantees to unlock World Bank funding and a further £240 million of bilateral assistance. The UK will also announce the expansion to £250 million of an investment package. In total, UK officials say, the UK’s non-military assistance to will be stretched to £4.7 billion.

In advance of the conference, investors were already meeting to sketch out some of the challenges facing investors. A policy institute, Chatham House, hosted one such discussion on Tuesday in London, which was attended by private investors from multinationals including Irish company, Kingspan.

Daniel Runde, from Washington think tank the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told the Chatham House event that Ukraine’s recovery and rebuilding should be aligned with membership of the European Union. He said it is capable of the “manufacturing heft” of Germany, but it needs “the defence industry of Israel so that nobody even messes with it ever again”.

But the first thing Ukraine must do to make itself an attractive investment location is to expel Russia’s military stranglehold on its south and east. That is not likely to happen quickly.