ANALYSIS: EBRD’s Ukraine bet pays off: record 2025 financing keeps the lights on—and the economy open

STOCKHOLM FEB 19 2026

This is an analysis of the EBRD’s latest communiqué on financing Ukraine and it is, on balance, a surprisingly upbeat document for a continent living in the age of air-raid alerts and emergency procurement.

The headline figure, a record €2.9 billion deployed in 2025, is not just another big number in the global alphabet soup of “support packages”. It is evidence that a serious multilateral bank can still do what it was built to do in a place that is trying very hard not to behave like a normal economy. The EBRD is effectively saying: Ukraine remains bankable enough to justify scale, repeat transactions, and institutional commitment. In wartime, that is not mere optimism; it is a statement of capacity.

The communiqué’s most encouraging subtext is that the Bank is not simply keeping the patient alive. It is keeping the patient functional. Its focus on energy security: over €1.2 billion in 2025, reads less like sectoral preference and more like systems thinking. Electricity and heat are not “infrastructure” in the abstract; they are the precondition for factories to run, hospitals to operate, businesses to open, and citizens to remain where they are. When the EBRD backs gas reserves, decentralised generation, repairs and reconstruction, it is underwriting continuity. That continuity is precisely what makes later reconstruction plausible rather than poetic.

The private-sector tilt is also good news. Over 90% of projects and 57% of investments went to the private sector, which is a polite way of saying the economy is still capable of doing business, not merely receiving aid. That matters because private firms are where adaptation happens, new supply chains, improvised logistics, replacement capacity, exports when possible, and jobs almost always. Keeping the private sector in the frame is how you avoid rebuilding a country into a permanent subsidy machine.

None of this works without the unglamorous machinery of risk-sharing, guarantees and donor grants—and the communiqué is candid about that, too. “Deployed” finance includes not just core EBRD investment but donor-funded instruments and trade finance. Rather than diminishing the achievement, it clarifies it: Ukraine support is increasingly sophisticated. The West is not simply sending money; it is engineering risk down so that lending and investment remain feasible. That is what a functioning financial coalition looks like.

The partner-bank channel is another bright spot, because it suggests breadth rather than boutique. Trade finance, portfolio risk-sharing and thousands of SME sub-loans do not make for cinematic storytelling, but they keep economic life granular and widespread—more firms surviving, more payrolls met, more imports financed, more exports shipped. In a war economy, that sort of boring resilience is a minor miracle.

Even the smaller items carry a hopeful logic. Veteran-oriented finance is not just compassionate; it is economically literate. Reintegration is easier when people can access credit, build businesses and re-enter working life with dignity. It is social policy disguised as financial product design, which is exactly the sort of pragmatic innovation Ukraine will need.

Most of all, the communiqué reads like a bank already rehearsing the future. The references to reform, project preparation (Ukraine FIRST), corporate governance, and capital-markets infrastructure are signals that the EBRD is not merely reacting to damage. It is pre-loading the next phase: building the pipelines, institutions and market infrastructure that determine whether reconstruction becomes investable and scalable. Reconstruction is often imagined as concrete and cranes. In reality, it is also procurement capacity, transparent governance, credible project preparation, and financial-market plumbing. Getting those right is how Ukraine moves from emergency funding to sustainable investment.

Of course, the risks have not evaporated. Donor backing must hold. Energy assets will remain targets. Absorptive capacity and governance will be tested at ever larger volumes. But the tone of the communiqué—record deployment, sustained annual commitments, private-sector emphasis, and institutional groundwork for capital markets—suggests a shift from improvisation to momentum.

The EBRD is, in effect, making a bet: that Ukraine’s economy is not just surviving, but learning—becoming tougher, more modular, more financeable, and more ready for the day when “deployed” can once again be replaced with the calmer verbs of peacetime.