The EBRD is one of Ukraine’s biggest investors, ploughing more than €4bn into the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. But the multilateral development bank’s president Odile Renaud-Basso said the bank will not finance Ukraine’s transformation into a European military industrial hub. “We cannot finance the defence industry and military production,” she said recently at a lecture she gave at the London School of Economics.
“Azerbaijan and Armenia are among our shareholders and we cannot start financing defence for one [and not the other]. This is something we cannot do,” she said. The two countries have been at war for the past four years over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
