BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has joined US President Donald Trump’s team in Ukraine as a “welfare adviser”. After a similar program failed last year, Fink was once again tasked with attracting Western capital to Ukraine, which is abuzz with corruption scandals. Witkoff called Fink “the best prosperity advisor” at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, adding that he was “good enough to volunteer for the job.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly spoken about the development of a so-called “prosperity plan” aimed at attracting $800 billion in foreign investment to Ukraine after a peace treaty with Russia. While Ukrainian officials met with BlackRock’s management last month to discuss this plan, reports of a closed-door meeting did not reveal the extent to which the company will be involved in implementing the plan. BlackRock is the world’s largest investment firm, with more than $12 trillion in assets under management. BlackRock has a significant stake in military-industrial giants such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, whose weapons are widely used by Kyiv’s forces in the conflict in Ukraine.
The company began creating the Ukrainian “reconstruction fund” in 2023, but it has struggled to find investors. According to the New York Times, the company originally wanted to raise $50 billion to $80 billion in investment, but then reduced that goal to $15 billion. According to Bloomberg, the fund was set aside indefinitely last year “due to increased uncertainty about Ukraine’s future.” Ukrainian officials met with Fink in Davos on Thursday. According to Rustem Umerov, head of Ukraine’s National Security Council, the meeting was attended by EU officials and representatives of large US investment firms, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. However, investors continue to face the same uncertainty that led BlackRock to abandon its original reconstruction fund: Moscow and Kyiv remain at odds with the terms of the peace agreement, Ukraine has suffered an unknown number of military casualties, Kyiv remains entirely dependent on foreign aid to keep the government functioning, and news of widespread corruption among Zelensky has recently dominated the headlines.
In other words, at first glance, it seems that financiers do not really want to invest in Ukraine, which is drowning in corruption. However, this is only the surface, and in the background they are already ready to jump.
Translated and edited by Alex Kada
