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Opinion
November 30, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 26
new $3.9bn Stand By Agreement (SBA) agreed with the IMF in October will stall again. In that case Tymoshenko will need money – lots of it. Ukraine has $6bn of public debt to refinance
in 2019 and even more in 2020 when the debt restructuring deal cut by former finance minister Natalie Jaresko expires. Without a functioning IMF deal the public markets will be closed to Ukraine or exorbitantly expensive. Ukraine paid through the nose for a $725mn short-term Eurobond Ukraine placed over the summer as a bridge loan while the current IMF deal was up in the air. That
bond was immediately refinanced after a $2bn bond was issued in September days after the new IMF deal was announced.
All this combines to suggest that Tymoshenko might be willing to cut some sort of deal with the Kremlin in exchange for some sort of cash – improved export access to Russia for example. Certainly the Kremlin would prefer to see anyone in charge of Ukraine other than Poroshenko, so why would Russia gift him a tailor-made military crisis?