Despite officials’ loud words, this does not yet mean a willingness to invest in Ukraine’s reconstruction. We have a history of grandiose agreements on billion-dollar injections that never turned into real foreign direct investment.
🚆For example, in 2018, General Electric signed a $1 billion agreement with Ukrzaliznytsia for locomotives. It was a framework contract: it provided for the delivery of 30 new diesel locomotives and the modernization of 75 old ones. From 2018 to 2019, GE delivered 30 locomotives to Ukraine, but further stages worth hundreds of millions have been postponed for now.
Another high-profile project is the construction of Hyperloop. In June 2018, the Ministry of Infrastructure signed a memorandum with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. Minister Volodymyr Omelyan said that the first Hyperloop line in Ukraine would be operational by 2023. A working group was created, and an R&D center in Dnipro was promised. But Hyperloop remained on paper.
At that time, Ukraine ranked 83rd out of 140 in the Global Competitiveness Ranking. According to the EBA, most investors did not plan significant capital investments due to corruption and the lack of real judicial reform.
🇨🇳 The authorities tried to befriend Chinese investors in 2017. At that time, at an intergovernmental commission meeting, China announced its willingness to allocate up to $7 billion for joint projects in infrastructure, trade, industry, and IT. Several bilateral protocols and memoranda were signed, including a roadmap for the New Silk Road initiative. In reality, Chinese investments in the following years were only sporadic: COFCO (a Chinese state-owned company) modernized the port infrastructure in Mariupol – a $50 million project, the memorandum for which was signed in 2019, and the Chinese company CHEC deepened the Yuzhny port in 2018 for $40 million. Only a small percentage of the announced $7 billion was implemented. And even that was not an investment. We paid the Chinese for their work.
🇦🇪 Another promising project was the signing of memoranda and contracts with UAE and Qatar funds in February 2021 for $3 billion. Some agreements from this period have materialized. For example, in 2020, the Qatari company QTerminals won the concession for the port of Olvia and began investing ~₴3.4 billion (≈$125 million) in port infrastructure — the result of lengthy negotiations in 2019. However, large Qatari or Emirati businesses have not made multi-billion-dollar investments in our economy.
A significant portion of the amounts announced at international forums is technical assistance (grants, aid) for institutional development, training, and consulting. Their importance cannot be overestimated, but this is not the kind of private business that invests money for profit. Many donor funds return to the West through payments for expert services, audits, and reports. For example, in 2024, USAID signed with Deloitte for $90 million to support healthcare reforms in Ukraine.
Returning to the news, the fate of all the memoranda signed at previous URC conferences is not optimistic. At the end of 2022, no state projects were launched, and the memorandum remained a framework document and a roadmap worth $750 billion.
The 2023 conference had only one concrete result – the launch of a digital portal for transparency in implementing DREAM projects. However, negotiations were also held with BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, and Marsh McLennan regarding creating an investment platform. Incidentally, BlackRock recently suspended its search for investors to support it “due to a lack of interest amid growing uncertainty about Ukraine’s future.”
Following the conference in 2024, there were no announcements of significant investments — only discussions of strategic principles for recovery.
✍️A memorandum is merely a declaration of intent, a diplomatic gesture. The chart below compares the amounts of funds announced and actual foreign direct investment.
Without the completion of judicial reform and guarantees of property rights, the following ” investment memoranda” will only add to the list of unfulfilled promises.