The West wants to help Ukraine and up to $200 billion euros within a new Marshall Plan, a Germany lawmaker says, but such money would only come if Ukraine commits to a transformation from a post-Soviet corrupt society to a modern and democratic European one.
Ukraine and the European Union signed a political and economic Assocation Agreement in 2014 requiring a complete overhaul of Ukraine’s economic, judicial and financial systems.
The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program) was an American initiative to help Western Europe recover from the devastation of World War II, with some $13 billion in U.S. aid at the time.
Karl-Georg Wellmann, head of the German-Ukrainian parliamentary group and a German parliament member, believes the modern Ukraine also needs a similar strategy to recover its industry and infrastructure as well as revamp its public administration and judiciary.
“So we think that Ukraine needs at the end of the day an amount of money between 100, 200 hundred billion euros to recover and get restructured,” he told the Kyiv Post. “We supported even Greece with 400 billion euros. And Greece is one-fifth or one-sixth the size of Ukraine.”
Wellmann said his party, the ruling Christian Democrats, adopted the strategy for Ukraine last year.
“It is our interest that Ukraine is stabilized politically, economically and gets a member of the European family,” he said. “We think that Ukraine has a strong potential as you have a strong industrial and technological history and other than Greece, Greece does not have this past.”
The project will be international and any aid should come under “a strong conditionality” with a very detailed plan and an institution which “must come here, and control the implementation of certain reforms. Not the adoption by the parliament, that is not enough.”
But it is still not more than a plan which is being discussed with the government, foreign ministry, and chancellor’s office in Germany. “The money is there. It is not a problem; the problem is reforms of course,” he said.
Another prerequisite is stability in Ukraine, preferably without early elections, which “will strengthen the radicals” and a political settlement for Russia’s war against eastern Ukraine.
Calls for a Marshall Plan-style grand aid program are not new.
In April, speaking at an international support for Ukraine conference, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk asked for investment instead of loans. “This is not working. The best Marshall Plan is investment in Ukraine,” Yatsenyuk said.
American billionaire George Soros called on the EU to expand its 11 billion euro aid project to Ukraine to 50 billion euros, arguing that “the new Ukraine is the most valuable asset that Europe has.”
Nothing more than fiction
Kyiv is now desperately waiting for a new tranche of the approved 17.5 billion euros lifeline, which was held up because of the faltering anti-corruption drive. Another big creditor, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, invested one billion euros in 2015.
Under such circumstances, talk of a Marshall Plan strikes some as fiction.
“Ukraine’s economy can accept any sums of aid because there is a need,” Anton Usov, senior advisor at EBRD told the Kyiv Post. “But this is huge money which no organization or organizations are able to give. Perhaps this is their vision what they would like to have, but it does not mean that this money will be found and allotted.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Savchuk can be reached at [email protected]
