WASHINGTON: The International Monetary Fund on Thursday said its board would review a staff-level agreement on an $8.1 billion lending program for Ukraine in coming days, paving the way for approval of a package that will help unlock other international support.
If approved, as widely expected, the program would replace an existing $15.5 billion IMF facility, helping Kyiv maintain economic stability and public spending as the war with Russia grinds into a fifth year. Ukraine has said it faces a near $140 billion budget shortfall over the next few years.
The four-year anniversary of the war is February 24. Since Moscow’s invasion, Ukraine has required hundreds of billions of dollars of support from Western governments and institutions and a more than $20 billion sovereign debt restructuring.
IMF spokeswoman Julie Kozack said Ukrainian authorities had now completed the prior actions needed to move forward with their request for a new IMF program, including submission of a draft law on the labor code and adoption of a budget. She told a briefing that Ukraine’s economic growth in 2025 was likely to come in under 2 percent. After four years of war, the country’s economy had settled into a slower growth path with larger fiscal and current account balances, she said, noting that the IMF continues to monitor the situation closely.
“Russia’s invasion continues to take a heavy toll on Ukraine’s people and its economy,” Kozack said. Intensified aerial attacks by Russia had damaged critical energy and logistics infrastructure, causing disruptions to economic activity, she said.
As of January, she said, 5 million Ukrainian refugees remained in Europe and 3.7 million Ukrainians were displaced inside the country. The World Bank, Ukrainian government and European Union are finalizing a new estimate for the cost to rebuild Ukraine that should be released next week, with experts predicting a significant jump from last year’s $524-billion estimate, given the severity of Russian attacks on energy infrastructure.
IMF Managing Director
Kristalina Georgieva
met with top Ukrainian officials in Kyiv in a surprise visit last month, telling Reuters she expected to submit the new lending program to the Fund’s board for approval in coming weeks.
At the time, she said the situation in Ukraine had clearly worsened since officials signed a preliminary lending agreement in November, requiring some changes, but the thrust of the program’s requirements would remain the same.
She said the IMF would assess which measures agreed in November were easily implemented and which needed to be “calibrated” more carefully. For instance, she said the Fund was looking at giving Ukraine a year to drum up support in parliament for passage of a controversial VAT measure.
Ukrainian Prime Minister
Yulia Svyrydenko
on Saturday said Kyiv had agreed with the IMF to ease some conditions for the program, including plans for sensitive tax increases affecting individual entrepreneurs.
The government had agreed to introduce a value-added tax for them, raising the revenue threshold to 4 million hryvnias ($92,592.59) from 1 million hryvnias ($23,148.15). Analysts now expect about 250,000 entrepreneurs to be affected by the increase, instead of over 600,000 in earlier plans.
The preliminary staff agreement assumes the war will end this year but includes a “downside scenario” that the war winds down slowly and does not end until 2028, according to IMF officials.
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IMF board to review staff-level $8.1 billion agreement for Ukraine in coming days
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IMF board to review staff-level $8.1 billion agreement for Ukraine in coming days
- Ukraine has said it faces a near $140 billion budget shortfall over the next few years
- Kozack said Ukrainian authorities had now completed the prior actions needed to move forward with their request for a new IMF program
Trump says he doesn’t know if aliens are real but directs government to release files on UFOs
- Former President Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that aliens were real
- Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested this week that the president was ready to speak about it
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’s directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs because of “tremendous interest.”
Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of disclosing “classified information” when Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that aliens were real.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” and said of Obama, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
In a post on his social media platform Thursday night, Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files related “to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
Obama, who made his comments in a podcast appearance over the weekend, later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” but said, “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”
Trump told reporters Thursday that when it came to the prospect of extraterrestrial visitors: “I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested this week that he was ready to speak about it, however, when she said on a podcast that the president had a speech prepared to deliver on aliens that he would give at the “right time.”
That was news to the White House. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with a laugh when she was asked about it Wednesday and told reporters, “A speech on aliens would be news to me.”
Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility of the government hiding secrets of extraterrestrial life re-emerged in the public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of unknown objects to The New York Times and Politico in 2017. The renewed scrutiny prompted Congress to hold the first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, though officials said that the objects, which appeared to be green triangles floating above a Navy ship, were likely drones.
Since then the Pentagon has promised more transparency on the topic. In July 2022 it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to be a central place to collect reports of all military UFO encounters, taking over from a department task force.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO at the time, told reporters he didn’t have any evidence “of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).”
The information that has been made public shows that the vast majority of UFO reports made by the military go unsolved but the ones that are identified are largely benign in nature.
An 18-page unclassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024 said service members had made 485 reports of unidentified phenomena in the past year but 118 cases were found to be “prosaic objects such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems.”
“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the report stressed.
Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of disclosing “classified information” when Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that aliens were real.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” and said of Obama, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
In a post on his social media platform Thursday night, Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files related “to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
Obama, who made his comments in a podcast appearance over the weekend, later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” but said, “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”
Trump told reporters Thursday that when it came to the prospect of extraterrestrial visitors: “I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested this week that he was ready to speak about it, however, when she said on a podcast that the president had a speech prepared to deliver on aliens that he would give at the “right time.”
That was news to the White House. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with a laugh when she was asked about it Wednesday and told reporters, “A speech on aliens would be news to me.”
Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility of the government hiding secrets of extraterrestrial life re-emerged in the public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of unknown objects to The New York Times and Politico in 2017. The renewed scrutiny prompted Congress to hold the first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, though officials said that the objects, which appeared to be green triangles floating above a Navy ship, were likely drones.
Since then the Pentagon has promised more transparency on the topic. In July 2022 it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to be a central place to collect reports of all military UFO encounters, taking over from a department task force.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO at the time, told reporters he didn’t have any evidence “of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).”
The information that has been made public shows that the vast majority of UFO reports made by the military go unsolved but the ones that are identified are largely benign in nature.
An 18-page unclassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024 said service members had made 485 reports of unidentified phenomena in the past year but 118 cases were found to be “prosaic objects such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems.”
“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the report stressed.
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