Vadym Chursin’s mother died long before the war. His father, Dmytro, has been his parent and best friend since he was very young. The two have grown even closer since their town near Ukraine’s southern border was occupied by Russian soldiers.
“There is barely anything left of our house today and not a single building still standing in our old town,” says Vadym, who is 16 years old and had lived in Oleshky, a city near Kherson, where his father ran a business building trendy tiny homes on wheels. For the past two years, father and son have been renting half a house about 220 kilometres to the west in Odesa, near Vadym’s new school. “We’re what people call displaced persons. There are many of us here and all of us are helping each other.”
Vadym attends Odesa School No. 41, one of the first schools repaired in 2021 under the European Investment Bank’s first Ukraine recovery programme. The Bank has helped modernise a group of Odesa schools since then and a city hospital.
Schools are a focus for the dozens of engineers, economists, loan officers and advisory specialists at the European Investment Bank who are trying to meet the urgent needs of Ukraine. Other critical work involves electricity lines, heating, water, roads, hospitals, community centres and bomb shelters. These types of projects allow people to go to work, drive to the doctor, buy groceries, get an education and stay safe during bomb attacks.
The Russian invasion has caused widespread devastation and created a humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and surrounding countries. Roads, bridges, hospitals, schools and residential buildings need repair in Ukraine, particularly in areas of intense fighting such as Kharkiv and the Donbas region. One study estimates economic damage in Ukraine at more than $150 billion since Russia invaded in February 2022. The cost of recovery over the next decade is estimated at about $500 billion.
The European Investment Bank is helping to renovate more than 300 schools, kindergartens, hospitals and social housing facilities in about 150 Ukrainian cities. It has improved electricity, gas, water, sanitation and solid waste management in more than a dozen regions, and has finished more than 100 projects. It receives new requests for help every week.
Pavel Novak, a public sector engineer at the European Investment Bank who is from Kyiv, where his parents still live, says a friend who was disabled in the war reminded him that soldiers are fighting to beat Russia, but also to see that other Ukrainians can continue to live normal lives in their home cities and communities today.
“My friend said to me, ‘Look, Pavel, we are doing this to keep life going on, bakeries and restaurants open, keep kids going to school and ensure that something beyond war still exists in this country.’”
In September 2024, the European Union’s financing arm proposed a €600 million energy rescue plan to help Ukraine as winter approaches, ensuring that businesses and homes have electricity and heat. Shelters will be built to protect electricity substations from bombings. The European Investment Bank is in regular discussions with Ukrhydroenergo, Ukraine’s largest hydropower company, and Ukrenergo, the national electricity transmission operator, to repair damaged power networks. It’s common for some parts of Ukraine to lose electricity for half of every day.
New levels of suffering
Violaine Silvestro von Kameke, a senior loan officer at the European Investment Bank, started visiting her projects in Ukraine in December 2023, after stopping such trips when the war began.
“Every time I go, I discover new suffering created by this war,” she says. “One of our local partners lost her parents in Bakhmut, and another young colleague lost her husband, leaving her alone with a 12-year-old boy. Some colleagues in Ukraine tell me their children are so stressed that they can’t sit still and can’t stop moving all the time, and mothers are cleaning the house during the bombings to take their minds off the dangers.”
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Our key initiatives in 2024
- The EIB Group has disbursed more than €2 billion to repair cities and cover urgent needs in Ukraine over the last three years. The Bank has loaned around €4 billion to countries surrounding Ukraine to help with housing, schools, medical care and employment for refugees.
- One of the most recent finance tools available is the EU for Ukraine Fund, designed to rebuild municipal buildings, restore public services and offer help to entrepreneurs. Countries around the European Union have pledged more than €420 million for this fund.
- The European Investment Bank is a partner in a European Union funding mechanism called the Ukraine Facility, a €50 billion recovery programme that runs until 2027. The Bank will use more than €2 billion from this fund on energy, roads, railways, water, housing and education.
- Important projects in 2024 include the expansion of 112 European emergency phone number in Ukraine to reach the police, an ambulance or firefighters; support for UNIT.City, Ukraine’s first innovation park dedicated to digital skills and training; and a €50 million loan for new metro coaches in Kyiv.
More support for female workforce
While men and many women fight on the frontlines, one overlooked aspect of the war is the burden placed on civilian women to sustain their families, the economy and society. Women have taken on new roles to prevent businesses and essential services from collapsing.
“Women are driving the tractors on farms, doing repairs in homes and business, working in the mines, serving as the police, driving emergency vehicles,” says Maria Gutsman, who works closely with the European Investment Bank in her role as a team leader in Kyiv for the United Nations Development Programme.
Gutsman would like to see international programmes help women in Ukraine get more training, more finance for women-led small businesses, access to information on grants and humanitarian assistance for women, and more support for developing their leadership skills.
“It’s a unique moment of solidarity in Ukraine right now,” Gutsman says. “Women have the chance to do new jobs and have new career opportunities that will also help the economy.”
A tough search to find builders
One of the hardest parts of the recovery projects is finding construction workers willing to work near conflict zones, says Silvestro von Kameke, the loan officer. The European Investment Bank made bidding procedures more flexible to find more companies that can repair schools, build bomb shelters and repair public services. Building schools is especially complicated because each one must include a strong bomb shelter.
“I was in Odesa in July, and cruise-missile warnings obliged me to stay in the bomb shelter when I was supposed to be getting ready to leave the country,” Silvestro von Kameke says. “In Kyiv as well, four times in one night, I had to go to a bomb shelter. I was always on alert and always tired, but this is daily life for Ukrainians.”
The European Investment Bank’s technical advisors also started returning to Ukraine under a programme called JASPERS, or Joint Assistance to Support Projects in European Regions. In September 2024, an advisory team visited Lviv and Kyiv to discuss ways to build higher quality rail connections among big cities and modernise train connections with other countries.
“Despite being in the midst of war, Ukrainians want to lay a strong foundation for the future, focusing on high-quality plans that will rebuild the country,” says Rafael Alcayde Ferrús, a transport engineer at the European Investment Bank who started making trips to Ukraine in 2024. “The EIB is ensuring that the advice provided is moving them closer to the European Union.”
One recent high-profile project supported by the European Investment Bank is the Kolos sports and rehabilitation complex in Reshetylivka, about 180 kilometres west of Kharkiv and the Russian border. The modernisation of the centre was financed with a €930 000 loan from the European Investment Bank. Many children and adults with physical or mental problems, including people injured in the war, receive help at this centre. This includes the Ukrainian volleyball team that competed at the Paralympics in Paris.
The European Investment Bank is renovating schools over a large chunk of the country. In two schools in Vinnytsia Oblast in central Ukraine, financing worth more than €500 000 was used in 2024 to add insulation, new windows and doors, and make other improvements for the winter. This helped more than 700 students and 100 staff. In Ternopil, in western Ukraine, a preschool for 250 children opened its doors in September 2024 with newly insulated walls, underfloor heating and a new boiler and ventilation system.
It’s too hard to predict the future
Dmytro Chursin
Vadym Chursin, the boy who resettled in Odesa with his father, has not attended much school for about five years because of the COVID-19 pandemic and then the war. It’s nice to live near a renovated school with new furniture and modern classrooms, he says, but the threat of shelling or a missile attack “makes it really tough for teachers to work and motivate students to study properly.”
Vadym goes fishing or go-karting with his father on the weekends, when it’s safe. He can’t say what is coming next for his country.
“Sometimes I don’t want to think about that because it’s tough to imagine anything good,” he says. “Living through the occupation, losing our home, family and friends has made us rethink everything. We try not to think too much about the future or the past. We live in the moment, trying to appreciate the present.”
