Ukraine’s Finance Minister Sergey Marchenko, on the sidelines of the recent IMF/World Bank meetings in Marrakech, admitted to Reuters that securing financial support from Ukraine’s Western backers has become more difficult. He said that Kiev is having to make “twice the effort right now to convince our partners to provide us with support,” compared to meetings six months ago. “I see a lot of tiredness, I see a lot of weakness among our partners, they would like to forget about the war but the war is still ongoing, full-scale.”
Without any reference to the West’s disappointment over the vaunted counteroffensive, Marchenko referred to elections in the U.S. and Europe as creating problems, as “a geopolitical shift and internal political context in different countries” was decreasing the previous attitude towards Ukraine. Of some note, he indicated that disruptions in the entire global economy were a factor, though he blamed it on the Gaza conflict as a trigger for the disruption to oil and shipping.
Marchenko did find some hope in a statement from the G7 central bank governors and finance ministers on Oct. 12 that they were considering following Belgium’s recent action, of seizing funds generated by Russian assets that Western countries have frozen, and using those as aid to Ukraine. The previous negative repercussions from the illegal freezing of the assets does not seem to be factored into the calculations of these G7 financial strategists.
