The European Union has disbursed the first 3 billion-euro tranche of a 90 billion-euro loan to Ukraine, while European leaders in Warsaw and Gdansk turned the country’s reconstruction into a conference circuit for state power, military financing, and private capital. Ukraine’s prime minister announced the payment Thursday at the opening of a conference on Ukraine’s post-war recovery in Poland, with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen among the attendees.
Brussels Writes the Cheque
Von der Leyen said the EU was reasserting its financial commitment to Ukraine just days after the country officially started EU membership negotiations on June 15. Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, she said, EU countries have provided 200 billion euros in economic, financial and military support to Ukraine, and approved 90 billion euros more over the next two years in the form of an EU support loan. The EU will start paying another 6 billion euros, a second tranche from the loan dedicated to drone production, “in the coming days.”
That is the architecture on display: the Brussels apparatus, national governments, and military-industrial priorities moving together, with drone production treated as a budget line and recovery folded into the same machinery. The conference in Warsaw was not just about rebuilding; it was also about aligning Ukraine more tightly with the European order, with von der Leyen saying the EU was reasserting its commitment just as membership talks began.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said, “We are forced to innovate to survive and this has become our superpower,” and added that Ukraine was grateful for the support promised to her war-battered nation. The line lands with the usual grim elegance of wartime governance: survival recast as innovation, devastation translated into a virtue, and dependence on external power dressed up as resilience.
Private Capital Joins the Reconstruction Queue
In Gdansk, European leaders said they are kicking off a European equity fund dedicated to investments in strategic sectors of the Ukrainian economy. Merz said, “With an initial public package of up to 220 million euros, we are creating the confidence and the risk-sharing mechanism that private investors need to engage now.” He said the fund originated at last year's recovery conference in Rome and is supported by the EU, Germany, Poland, Italy and France.
Merz also said that although public funding alone will never be enough to rebuild Ukraine, “by investing now and committing long-term capital, Europe’s is sending a clear message: we believe in Ukraine’s future within the European family.” The language is polished, but the mechanism is plain enough: public money is used to de-risk private investors, and the future is framed as belonging inside the European family, that familiar club of markets, borders, and managed access.
Svyrydenko said the Ukrainian delegation is planning to sign 160 deals totaling over 10 billion euros during the conference in Gdansk. The conference thus became not only a diplomatic stage but a marketplace for contracts, packages, and strategic sectors, with state officials acting as brokers for capital.
History, Honor, and the State's Old Wounds
The Ukrainian delegation was led by Svyrydenko after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pulled out just days before, following a dispute with Polish President Karol Nawrocki over World War II events that have strained the countries’ relations. Nawrocki this month stripped Zelenskyy of Poland’s highest state honor because Zelenskyy named a military unit after a Ukrainian paramilitary organization accused of massacring Poles during the war.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, fought for Ukrainian independence against both Nazi German and Soviet forces. But it is accused in Poland of wartime killings of tens of thousands of Poles, most in the Nazi-occupied regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, which the Polish state qualifies as genocide. Zelenskyy has since returned the award to Poland, with other Ukrainian officials also following suit.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that Zelenskyy’s absence at the conference might help reduce the tensions. Svyrydenko made no reference to the dispute in her speech. Tusk said, “We can only build the future on the basis of truth, mutual respect and understanding the past.”
What the conference actually showed was less a clean future than the familiar choreography of states managing memory, money, and military alignment at once. The EU’s loan package, the drone tranche, the equity fund, and the 160 planned deals all sat inside the same framework: governments deciding the terms, investors waiting for guarantees, and ordinary people left to absorb the costs of war, reconstruction, and the political bargains made over their heads.