SWITZERLAND: Ukraine told an international conference Monday that it will cost an estimated US$ 750 billion to rebuild the war-shattered country, a task President Volodymyr Zelensky said was the shared duty of the democratic world.
Speaking at the opening of the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Switzerland, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal described the massive destruction and acknowledged the needs were towering.
Ukraine’s recovery, he said, “is already estimated at US$ 750 billion. We believe that the key source of recovery should be the confiscated assets of Russia and Russian oligarchs.”
“The Russian authorities unleashed this bloody war, they caused this massive destruction, and they should be held accountable for it,” he said.
Speaking via video message, Zelensky stressed that “reconstruction of Ukraine is not a local task of a single nation.”
“It is a common task of the whole democratic world,” he said, insisting that “reconstruction of Ukraine is the biggest contribution to the support of global peace.”
The two-day conference, held under tight security in the picturesque southern Swiss city of Lugano, had been planned well before the invasion, and had originally been slated to discuss reforms in Ukraine before being repurposed to focus on reconstruction.
As billions of dollars in aid flow into Ukraine, however, lingering concerns about widespread corruption in the country mean far-reaching reforms remain in focus and will be a condition for any recovery plan decided here. The Kyiv School of Economics has estimated the damage so far to buildings and infrastructure at nearly US$ 104 billion and that Ukraine’s economy has already suffered losses of up to US$ 600 billion.
– THE BANGKOK POST