Page 58 - bne monthly magazine June 2024 Russian Despair Index

58 I Eastern Europe bne June 2024
take part in the wreath laying ceremony at the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square, and together with Xi he will visit a gala concert on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries and the opening of the Year of Russian Culture in China, TASS reports.
The two may also discuss China’s attendance at an international peace summit being organised in Switzerland to discuss the war in Ukraine. China has been invited but has yet to say whether Xi will attend.
Representative delegation
The Sino-Russian meeting was as much about business as it was politics and Putin brought a very large delegation that included most of Russia’s blue-chip companies that had parallel meetings with their Chinese counterparts. The
Russian president was also accompa- nied by nearly the entire new cabinet sworn in during last week’s reshuffle, as well as dozens of regional governors and top executives of big businesses.
TASS reports that the members of
the delegation included: First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov, Deputy Prime Ministers Dmitry Chernyshenko, Alexander Novak, Yury Trutnev, Tatiana Golikova, Vitaly Savelyev; Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshet- nikov, head of the Financial Monitoring Agency Yury Chikhanchin, Minister of Natural Resources Alexander Kozlov; Russian Railways CEO Oleg Belozerov, Rosatom CEO Alexey Likhachev; head of the Federal Service for Military Tech- nical Cooperation Dmitry Shugayev, Roscosmos CEO Yury Borisov; deputy
heads of the presidential administration Maxim Oreshkin and Dmitry Peskov, presidential aide Yury Ushakov; Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Defence Min- ister Andrey Belousov, Russian Secu- rity Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu; co-chairman of the Russian-Chinese friendship committee and business- men’s rights ombudsman Boris Titov, head of the Russian-Chinese Business Council and co-owner of Volga Group Gennady Timchenko; Sberbank Presi- dent and board chairman Herman Gref, Oleg Derpaska, director general of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev, VTB President Andrey Kostin, Rosmano and Novatek board chairmen Sergey Kulikov and Leonid Mikhelson, head of Business Russia Alexey Repik, Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, President of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Alexander Shokhin, and VEB chairman Igor Shuvalov.
Ukraine – running through the numbers Tim Ash of BlueBay Asset Management in London
Lots of figures are thrown around about the cost of supporting Ukraine in its defence against the Russian invasion. I have myself used a $100bn a year price tag for keeping Ukraine in the war, and likely a $50bn a year price tag to fund post war reconstruction.
The Kiel Institute for the World Economy provides by far the best tracker of Western support for Ukraine.
I also combine this with Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance website which provides a tracker of budget support for Ukraine.
According to data from Kiel, total US and European support for Ukraine (military and budget/humanitarian) since the onset of the full-scale invasion until the end of February 2024 was €156.7bn. In addition, Japan provided around €6bn over this same period, and Canada around €5.4bn. This would then
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put the total at over €168bn. Of this total around €67.1bn had been provided by the US – and obviously this excluded the latest $61bn support package for Ukraine approved by the US Congress
n April 2024.
The €168bn total excludes multilateral financing (IMF and World Bank, plus EIB) which, according to the Ukrainian MOF, amounted to around $11bn for the period from the onset of the full scale invasion to March 2024.
Also note that to plug holes left by the delay in US funding from the $61bn package, which had originally been slated for last fall, the EU and other donors front loaded some of their disbursements in Q124. The MOF hence reports over $8bn in additional Western funds were directed to Ukraine in March 2024, including $4.8bn from the EU (part of the €50bn facility agreed at the EU council meeting in December to cover Ukraine to the period to 2027), an
additional $1.2bn from Japan and $1.5bn from Canada and just over $0.5bn from the UK.
€168bn is around $180bn in US money, add in the $11bn multilateral financing, and the $8bn detailed above for March and that is already just over $199bn in effect for 25 months. One could perhaps also add in the external debt service relief accrued to Ukraine of well over $10bn also over this period.
Suffice to say the $100bn figure of the annual cost of supporting Ukraine looks about par – not bad from my finger in the air approach.
Notable though that the above figure is just to keep Ukraine in the war, and not actually ensuring victory – Ukraine is currently on the back foot so whatever we are doing is not enough. The West is only just providing Ukraine with enough funds to keep it in the war.
In recent months Western financial