Beneath the damaged roof of the house, dozens of workers rhythmically hammer in nails. Around them, cranes, bulldozers and trucks are frantically repairing roads and buildings torn apart by Russian artillery. It’s hard to believe that this noisy construction site is located on Yablonskaya Street, in bootin the north of Kyiv, at the crossroads, where a year ago the corpses of dozens of citizens, brutally murdered, lay Russian soldiers. Some were shackled.

Ukraine has already fully rebuilt many areas destroyed by Moscow, including bridges, roads and government buildings. This is just the start of what Kyiv has called the biggest renovation since World War II, and perhaps the most costly in history., at an estimated cost of half a trillion dollars. But managing this unprecedented influx of money into a country with a long history of corruption will not be easy, experts say.

“Under the Marshall Plan, a US program that provided financial assistance to rebuild the infrastructure of post-war Europe, Washington provided $13.3 billion to 16 countries,” says Donald Bowser, founder of the NGO Ukraine Recovery Support Initiative. on projects in the previously occupied territories of Ukraine. “That’s about $150 billion at today’s exchange rate. Restoring Ukraine could cost the West four to five times as much. No one has ever invested all this money in the reconstruction of one country.”

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesny said in early July last year that rebuilding the war-torn country would begin before the end of hostilities with Russia, many Western leaders were wary. The idea of ​​starting to rebuild the country while its cities continued to be destroyed by Russian bombs seemed as foolish as it was dangerous. And yet Zelensky was consistent in his words.

One of the most iconic images of the war is from early March 2022. In the photo, hundreds of civilians huddle under the ruins of the key bridge that connected Irpen with Butsa, which at that time left people between life and death: from one side, Russian artillery was advancing from the north, on the other, security on the road to Kiev. A year later, dozens of workers almost completed its restoration.

Last year, Ukraine cleared 2,100 kilometers of debris from roads, repaired 120 kilometers of them, restored 41 out of 330 damaged bridges, created 80 temporary crossings and upgraded 900 railway switches.such as stations and depots.

“When we talk about transport, there are several key challenges that we are trying to solve,” Deputy Minister of Infrastructure Alexandra Azarkina told the Guardian. “Firstly, in order to prevent a humanitarian crisis within the country, and secondly, in order to prevent a global food crisis.. Restoring key transport corridors is also important to continue supplying the front lines. Do we mean that what we have restored can be destroyed again? Yes, but it’s a risk we have to take. And frankly, recovery is also part of our resistance.”

As of January, the Kyiv School of Economics has reported 149,300 damaged homes, 330 hospitals, 595 administrative buildings, and more than 3,000 school and university buildings.

The construction work completed so far was paid for by Ukraine’s cash reserves and an initial payment of $600 million from the European Investment Bank, which approved a second package of €1.59 billion in July 2022.

According to the latest assessment, Ukraine’s reconstruction and recovery needs have reached $411 billion, the World Bank said. However, the assessment is constantly growing due to constant shelling and the lack of reliable evidence in the occupied territories. Prime Minister of Ukraine Denis Smyhal said the cost of reconstruction could be $750 billion.

“The overall damage is terrible and not everything that has been destroyed needs to be rebuilt,” Azarkina tells the Guardian. “The country has changed, the population has moved. We must be prudent in our use of this money. But let’s not forget that Ukraine didn’t destroy its infrastructure, Russia did, they are the bad guys and they should pay for it.”

International media are wondering how realistic Russian reparations are. In February, Poland and the Baltic states urged the EU and Western governments to use frozen Russian central bank reserves – 300 billion euros – to start rebuilding the country. However, experts argued that the redistribution of Russian assets would violate international law.

Azarkina says Ukraine has frozen several hundred million euros of Russian assets in the country, referring to how the justice minister is working to resolve legal issues to use the money to rebuild private homes.

A significant part of the reconstruction will also be financed by private foreign investment. Many of the destroyed businesses will not be “resurrected” by simply repairing the buildings they housed if Ukraine wins the war, and the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers returning to their cities from the front line will need work.

“We need to create jobs”Sergiy Chivkach, chief executive of UkraineInvest, Ukraine’s investment promotion office, told the Guardian “to transform the country from a commodity exporter into a prosperous European state with a developed industry.”

Chivkach says he has already received many inquiries from foreign companies and dozens of projects are already underway, but some investors are still wary of him.

There is not only a question of investing in a country that is still being bombed. Another problem, according to the British newspaper, is the widespread corruption that has haunted Ukraine since independence. Transparency International ranked Ukraine as the second most corrupt country in Europe in 2021, behind only Russia.

“The international community should be very afraid of how corruption can jeopardize recovery and should immediately start taking action to combat it,” says Bowser, who has 25 years of experience in governance and anti-corruption programs. “Corruption is still endemic there.”

As Ukraine takes its first steps toward EU membership, the government is under pressure to show it has “cleaned up”. Dozens of senior officials have been sacked in recent months, and Zelenskiy has said he will take a zero-tolerance approach.

“Ukraine has made significant progress lately,” Chivkach told a British newspaper. “We have had many scandals in the past. We saw them on TV, but we didn’t see proper government enforcement after these scandals. Now what is happening is that we are seeing a case of corruption, and the state immediately responds to the filing of charges against the perpetrators.”

However, much remains to be done. “One of the lessons I’ve learned from Ukraine is that there are new voices on the front lines and they won’t sit idly by while the country is looted again,” Bowser says. “A million Ukrainian veterans who returned from the war, without limbs, who shed their blood for this country, are not going to accept what was before 2014.”

“These people,” Bowser adds, speaking to the Guardian, “will not throw corrupt officials into trash cans, as they have done in the past, but will hang them from lampposts.”

Source: Guardian