The fifth German-Ukrainian Economic Forum will take place in Berlin on Monday, the first such event since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression in February. The participants include Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and the Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Schmyhal. On Tuesday, an international expert conference on reconstruction in Ukraine will take place in Berlin at the invitation of the German G7 Presidency and the EU.
In the run-up to the event, 50 experts prepared a dossier with detailed proposals and offers for reconstruction in Ukraine on the initiative of the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations, as reported by the RND. The paper therefore proposes that the European countries involved in the reconstruction and the EU each appoint a high-level coordinator. The coordinators are to form a council that will exchange information with Kyiv on needs and projects.
According to the RND, the dossier states that each donor country should retain control of its own project funds in order to ensure transparency and accountability. Harms said there were two things to be done: "People need to see quick results in rebuilding destroyed infrastructure. At the same time, the foundations for sustainable growth need to be laid."
Above all, this means "exploiting Ukraine's huge growth potential in the fields of digitization, agriculture and green energies and consistently building a low-carbon economy," explained the OA Managing Director.
As long as war reigns, a huge wave of investment by German companies in Ukraine should of course not be expected, said Harms. It will be more of a gradual process, but one that needs to be prepared for.
Chancellor Scholz and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are calling for a "Marshall Plan" to rebuild Ukraine. In a joint article for the "Frankfurter Allgemeine" (Monday edition), they wrote that it was "a generational task that must begin now".
In the long term, it will be important "that private donors and companies invest in the reconstruction of Ukraine," emphasized von der Leyen and Scholz. The EU has a special role to play here because Ukraine is a candidate for accession: "The path to reconstruction is therefore also Ukraine's path to the European Union."
Scholz had already proposed a Marshall Plan for Ukraine at the summit of the G7 group of leading industrialized countries in June at Schloss Elmau. The Chancellor drew a parallel to the Marshall Plan implemented under US direction, which had financed the reconstruction of war-ravaged Western Europe after the Second World War.
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