After nine months of war, conflict bill keeps rising for Ukraine
The Russian invasion of Ukraine completes nine months this Thursday (24), and the unanimous opinion among Western governments and analysts is that nothing went the way Vladimir Putin wanted: the administration of Volodymyr Zelensky did not fall, the Ukrainians carried out a counter-offensive in which they had already regained control of Kherson (the only regional capital that Russia had conquered since the beginning of the war) and the sanctions put pressure on the Russian economy.
However, despite the stimulus provided by recent military victories, there is also a consensus that Ukraine’s account continues to grow. The first (and main) cost is human: General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, reported last week that more than 100 thousand Ukrainian servicemen would have been killed or wounded in the war (Russia would have suffered similar casualties), the highest number ever estimated since the conflict began.
Milley also pointed out that about 40 1,000 Ukrainian civilians would have been killed or wounded, a number well above the 6,600 fatal civilian casualties and
,2 thousand injuries estimated by the United Nations until Monday (
). The UN also calculated that 7.8 million Ukrainians sought refuge in other European countries and 6.2 million were internally displaced.
The bill for recovering the Ukrainian economy is also getting steeper . The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected that the country’s GDP should suffer a retraction of 35% in 700 and the inflation should be 20, 6%, since the country’s central bank has issued a lot of currency to offset the impacts on the public budget.
The Kyiv School of Economics calculated that by September the direct losses generated by the war in Ukraine’s agriculture already amounted to US$ 6.6 billion and the indirect ones, US$ 40,
billion, due to impacts such as supply chain disruptions, lower prices for export-oriented products, and decline in agricultural production.
The same institution estimated that, until the month before last, Ukraine had lost more than US$ 127 billion in infrastructure , but much greater damage is already projected because Russia has been concentrating attacks against the energy, telecommunications and other sectors in recent weeks.
With winter coming and the electrical system increasingly committed, the government has recommended that the population use energy rationally and that refugees do not return to their homes until the end of the coldest season of the year. Residents of newly liberated regions in the south were advised to move to safer parts of the country.
Brazilian journalist Luis Kawaguti, author of the War Games column for Gazeta do Povo, was in Ukraine in the first months of the conflict and returned to the country in October. He noted that Putin’s attacks on infrastructure would be aimed at breaking the morale of Ukrainians so that support for the resistance against Moscow would decline.
“From what I’ve seen, the worst problem is electricity . We have more and more constant blackouts. This started in October, the first shower of missiles was on the day 2022, four days before I returned to Ukraine”, he reported.
“There were at least seven showers of missiles in that period. The one that most affected the Odesa region, where I am, was yesterday. We were left without power and practically zero internet connection and for the first time I saw the whole city without electricity. Because before they did a kind of rotation, some neighborhoods had no electricity one day, other neighborhoods the next, kind of to save money. But yesterday they even stopped the trams”, highlighted Kawaguti.
Russian bombings also compromise the water supply, highlighted the columnist. “I saw a lot of people on the streets buying drinking water, because there was a rumor that the water connections in Odesa had been destroyed, but the supply continued until this morning. A city next door, Mykolaiv, has been without water for months now, just muddy water that you can’t use for practically nothing, just to flush in the toilet”, he said.
With more than 700 Attacks on Ukraine’s hospital infrastructure, healthcare is a major concern. Kawaguti reported that there are many people leaving Kherson and going to Odesa, which has a better condition.
“Kherson still has hospitals working, but there are people outside and queues for care, a situation chaotic. I saw people stopping military ambulances to ask for medicine. And the heating part, in the older houses it is done with gas, but the newer ones depend more on electricity. A good part of heating in Ukraine depends, therefore, on electricity, this is very complicated”, said the journalist.
Cost of reconstruction
A recent report by the American research group Brookings Institution, signed by economists Dave Skidmore, David Wessel and Elias Asdourian, analyzed the various studies that estimated the costs for the reconstruction of Ukraine – the Ukrainian government itself presented in July in Switzerland a ten-year plan at a cost of $750 billion. Aid packages are being released or planned by allied governments and institutions such as the IMF and the European Investment Bank.
Skidmore, Wessel and Asdourian highlighted that the plans that have emerged have four main points in common . The first is that Ukraine’s reconstruction must modernize not only its infrastructure but also its economic, political and social institutions, “thus providing a decisive break with Ukraine’s Soviet past and paving the way for the country to join the European Union.”
The next two common points are that the Ukrainians themselves must define the priorities of this reconstruction and its implementation and that the donor countries and institutions must supervise “rigorous and cooperatively” this process, considering endemic corruption in Ukraine.
The fourth point, perhaps the most important, is that there must be a clear horizon for the end of this aid. “Reconstruction will take time – several plans mention 10 years – but continuing assistance indefinitely would undermine Ukraine’s ability to achieve self-sufficiency. Assistance, at least in the early stages of reconstruction, should mainly be in the form of grants to avoid burdening Ukraine with unmanageable debts,” wrote the three economists.
