Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the heads of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other finance leaders on Wednesday that his country needs $14.1 billion dollars immediately to begin infrastructure repair, urging them to take some of the money from frozen Russian assets.
Zelensky made the remarks during a teleconference meeting in which he spent much of his time discussing the destruction of civilian infrastructure in cities and the need to return Ukraine to normal in the event that the Russian invasion of the country concludes.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 – long before Zelensky, a former comic actor, launched his political career – and colonized Ukraine’s Crimea region that year. The international community did little to react to Russia’s takeover of Crimea or its ongoing support of pro-Russian rebels in the eastern Donbass region, where a Russian-made Buk missile shot down a commercial airliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 14, in 2014. Outraged officials in Europe and America suddenly began prioritizing the Ukraine war in February 2022, when Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced he would send Russian troops to formally invade Ukraine, rather than merely support local separatists, and that they would conduct a “special operation” to oust Zelensky.
According to the Ukrainian Finance Ministry, America has given Ukraine $15.5 billion in financial assistance between February 2022 and Wednesday. American officials said in February the number was closer to $50 billion, including humanitarian aid; at the time, “financial assistance” totaled approximately $13 billion.
