Washington:
The World Bank announced Monday that it is providing nearly $200 million in additional and reprogrammed funding to bolster Ukraine’s social services for vulnerable people, on top of the $723 million approved last week.
The funding is part of a $3 billion bailout package that the World Bank previously announced it was preparing for Ukraine in the coming months.
World Bank President David Malpass told a virtual event hosted by the Washington Post that the bank hoped to complete the $3 billion bailout package in six to eight weeks to help Ukraine meet its needs.
“The magnitudes are astronomical,” Malpass said. “Ukraine has been hit by the economic slowdown itself, the crops that are in the fields – difficult to harvest them.” He said Russian troops were trying to cut off Ukrainian peasants from both food and money.
“It’s a hard and horrific effort that takes place almost on a day-to-day basis,” he said, adding that the rebuilding would involve highways, bridges and other key infrastructure.
“That amounts to tens of billions of dollars,” he said.
To help Ukraine now, the bank brought out “as much cash as possible,” Malpass said, adding it would also begin building a pipeline of projects to help Ukrainians, some of whom now lived in Poland and elsewhere. , as part of the $3 billion package.
“Our immediate focus at the moment…is how do we help the people who are under attack right now?”
The World Bank said the combined total of aid already approved for Ukraine was about $925 million.
It said Austria had provided 10 million euros ($11 million) for a multi-donor trust fund set up by the World Bank to facilitate the funneling of grant money from donors to Ukraine. That brought the total amount in the fund to $145 million, the bank said.
(This story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and was generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)