by WorldTribune Staff, July 20, 2025 Real World News
In 2023, BlackRock launched its Ukraine Development Fund aimed at rebuilding that nation when its war with Russia ended.
Two years later, with a bombed-out Ukraine set to be on the losing end of the conflict, the BlackRock fund has yet to attract any investors, an analyst wrote.
“It was originally envisaged as one of the most ambitious public-private finance collaborations in history, which would rival Washington’s Marshall Plan that rebuilt – and heavily indebted – Western Europe in World War II’s wake,” investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg wrote in a July 14 analysis.
“With vast returns promised, initially investors were reportedly ‘ready to plow funds’ into the endeavor, due to widespread optimism Kiev’s much-hyped ‘counteroffensive’ later that year ‘might end the war quickly.’ ”
Ukraine suffered up to 100,000 casualties in the counteroffensive and much of its Western-supplied armor, vehicles, and weapons were destroyed. Ukraine managed to recapture just 0.25% of the territory occupied by Russia in the war’s initial phases.
As BlackRock vice chair Philipp Hildebrand explained, the results killed off investor exuberance, as they required “the cessation of hostilities, or at the very least a perspective for peace.” Concerns about Ukraine’s ever-reducing skilled workforce were also widespread.
“Fast forward to today, and there is no indication of any peace deal on the horizon, Russia is rapidly advancing across multiple fronts, and the Ukrainian government estimates the country has lost around 40% of its working-age population due to the proxy war,” Klanenberg wrote. “No wonder BlackRock’s Development Fund has failed to attract a single dollar. Quite what will remain of Ukraine when the conflict is over, and whether any financial returns can be gleaned from its ruins, are open, grave questions.”
During the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in January 2023, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink had pledged to coordinate billions of dollars in reconstruction financing for Ukraine, which he predicted would become a “beacon of capitalism.”
Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon spoke at the WEF with intense optimism: “There is no question that as you rebuild, there will be good economic incentives for real return and real investment.”
Ukrainian leader Volodymry Zelenskyy spoke at multiple events held at Davos over the five-day-long conference. He spoke of recapturing Crimea, and demanded attendees “give us your weapons.”
On one panel, Boris Johnson, who personally sabotaged fruitful peace talks between Kiev and Moscow in April 2022, urged Zelenskyy be provided “the tools he needs to finish the job.” The disgraced former British Prime Minister boomed, “Give them the tanks! There’s absolutely nothing to be lost!”
Kranenberg noted: “In future, the January 2023 Davos summit may be viewed both as the glimmering apex of Ukraine’s proxy war effort, and roughly when everything began to spectacularly unravel. The desired weapons arrived in huge quantities, to no effect. Kiev’s three biggest military efforts since, all British-planned – that year’s counteroffensive, the Krynky incursion, and Kursk ‘counterinvasion’ – were deeply costly cataclysms, leaving Ukraine undermanned and ill-equipped to fend off Russian advances. Countries that supplied munitions borderline disarmed themselves in the process.”
Meanwhile, Kranenberg concluded, “there is little indication that Britain has given up on making Kiev safe for neoliberalism and its own profit, despite London’s covert commitment to ‘keeping Ukraine fighting at all costs.’ Of course, the longer the lost proxy war grinds on, the less Ukraine there will be to rebuild, and reap returns from. But apparently, this unambiguous reality is lost on the proxy war’s sponsors. God help us all.”
BlackRock’s hyped ‘Development Fund’ bombs in bombed-out Ukraine added by Editor Two on
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