The World Economic Forum conference kicked off today in Davos, Switzerland. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky opened the annual conference by requesting $5 billion a month from the global community.
Zelensky requested the cash infusion immediately.
The US Congress and Joe Biden just gave Ukraine $40 billion of taxpayer dollars last week.
Fortune.com reported:
In the three-day summit’s opening address, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, dressed in his trademark wartime olive-green T-shirt, and projected on monitors from Kyiv, told about 1,000 CEOs and government officials that Ukraine needs $5 billion a month, beginning immediately, in order to stave off full-blown economic collapse—a collapse that would have deep global ramifications.
“The amount of work is enormous,” he said. “We have more than a half a trillion dollars in losses, and tens of thousands of facilities destroyed. We need to rebuild entire cities and industries.”
Yet rather than describing the dire situation as a crisis, Zelensky cast it as a potentially lucrative opportunity for Western countries and companies.
“Patronage” for investors
Zelensky said Ukraine would have a “special, historically significant model of rebuilding,” in which companies and countries could choose a specific region or mine to rebuild. This system, which he called a “patronage,” is meant as a way of attracting the world’s top engineers and architects to Europe’s biggest reconstruction since the aftermath of the Second World War, nearly 80 years ago.