Four years of war leave Russia stagnating and Ukraine exhausted

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : While Ukraine remains entirely dependent on outside assistance, the €90bn EU loan granted in December, together with other monies collected from the G7 and elsewhere, will be enough to keep Ukraine funded for another two years according to a recent paper from Kyiv School of Economics (KSE).
57% : " World Bank predictions of poverty rates soaring to 37% have come to pass and a dream of a stable EU future has been traded for the daily maths of survival: "deciding whether to buy warm boots for a growing child or paying for the fuel needed to run a generator during another blackout," says Boyechko.
54% : Russia is also seeing its share of interest payments in government expenditure rise alarmingly, but there is still some RUB20 trillion ($220bn) in liquidity in the banking sector the Kremlin can tap.
50% : And that is before it starts to raise taxes; on January 1 VAT went up two percentage points, the first tax hike during the war, which alone counts for 40% of government revenues, compared to 25% it earns from the minerals (oil) extraction tax.
47% : Bankova immediately denied the Wall Street Journal report although the European Union's plan has been to provide a €90bn loan specifically to allow Ukraine to fight on for at least two years and two thirds of that money is dedicated to military spending.
46% : He recently questioned if Ukraine could recover at all if the fighting stopped tomorrow or if Ukraine would remain a EU-dependant, doomed to several decades of decline before reaching its nadir, weighed down by demographic catastrophe, lack of capital and paucity of resources and power.
37% : Still, that is less than the EU's excessive deficit mechanism trigger of 3% of GDP - a level that France, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Hungary and Slovakia are currently all in breach of.
35% : Greece and Malta have blocked the measures to ban EU ships from working for the shadow fleet as they make too much money.
26% : EU divided The EU continues to demonstrate its disunity and disarray with the debacle surrounding what should have been a headline twentieth sanctions package targeting Russia's shadow fleet and cutting the Kremlin off from its oil revenues.

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