Putin Urges to Stop Ukraine from Wasting IMF Cash on War
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday Moscow didn’t object to Ukraine receiving financial aid from the International Monetary Fund and other big lenders, but stressed they should prevent the money from being used to wage war on civilians in the east. ● “Of course, we are all up for supporting Ukraine financially, meaning the people of Ukraine, and not some oligarchs or swindlers,” Putin said during a press conference in Brazil. “The [IMF] fund has traditionally abstained from providing financial assistance to countries at war, and I think it is the right thing to do. I believe this tradition must be upheld in Ukraine’s case. As a rule, a country at war is given money for one goal and it spends the cash on quite another,” Putin noted. Kiev received the first IMF tranche of $3.16 billion in early May after the fund approved a $17 billion loan to Ukraine in the form of a two-year stabilization program. Ukraine is expected to receive a total of $27 billion from international donors such as the IMF, the World Bank, the US and the EU. From this sum about $14 billion is to come in 2014. Putin urged the IMF to think of such control instruments to monitor the distribution of financial aid in Ukraine so as to see to it that this money is channeled into the nation’s social and economic spheres, and not siphoned off by murky private banks or stolen.
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