The Board of Directors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) approved the decision to terminate financial cooperation and provide technical assistance to Russia and Belarus.

Termination of financial cooperation

This is reported by the railway magazine Railway Supply with a link to interfax.ru.

“The access of the Russian Federation and Belarus to the resources of the bank should be officially terminated with immediate effect. This means that no country can have new funding for technical cooperation projects or activities. In addition, the bank enjoys all rights to suspend or cancel further payments on existing projects,” the EBRD said in a statement.

The EBRD expects Russia’s GDP to fall by 10% in 2022 and zero dynamics in 2023.

In early March, the EBRD’s board of directors approved the management’s proposals, cutting off access to EBRD resources for the Russian Federation and Belarus as a response to their actions in Ukraine. The decision, which has an indefinite nature, had to be approved by the EBRD’s board of directors.

As EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso said in a bank statement, Russia’s military aggression “left us no choice but to express our condemnation not only in words.”

“Action is also needed to ensure that the two countries have no doubt that we believe they have undermined values that are important to us as an institution and to the international community,” the official said.

Earlier, the EBRD announced that it was closing its offices in Moscow and Minsk.

It is noted that the EBRD has not invested in new projects in Russia since 2014. At the same time, the current loan portfolio of the institution in Belarus contains 142 projects worth 1 billion euros, with the private sector accounting for almost 60%.

At the same time, the EBRD has traditionally been one of the largest lenders for infrastructure development in Ukraine.

Among the projects implemented with the assistance of the bank is the purchase of a fleet of modern track machines and the construction of a new Beskydy tunnel.

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