MOSCOW, August 20 (RIA Novosti) – The International Monetary Fund (IMF) will have to amend the terms of its stabilization program for Ukraine because the country is unable to fulfill its obligations, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak said Wednesday.
“From the very beginning, I was fairly skeptical about how this program would work in its original layout,” the deputy minister told reporters.
“I think it will get harder and harder for our colleagues to fulfill their obligations under the stand-by arrangement and, inevitably, the program will have to be adjusted. The next conference will show whether these adjustments will result in more funds being allocated,” he said, adding that the next IMF conference on Ukraine is scheduled to take place this fall.
Storchak said Russia had no plans to hinder further IMF loans to Ukraine.
“We have never planned to put a stick in the spokes as far as Ukraine’s cooperation with international financial institutions is concerned,” the official said.
Kiev received the first IMF loan tranche of $3.16 billion in early May after the fund approved a $17 billion loan to Ukraine in the form of a two-year stabilization program. Ukraine is expected to receive a total of $27 billion from international donors such as the IMF, the World Bank, the United States and the European Union. From this sum about $14 billion is to come this year.
Despite ongoing political crisis and military conflict in the country and worsening economic prospects of Ukraine the IMF refused to comment on a possibility of reassessing the loan program.
