The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has resumed the operations of its permanent representation office in Ukraine, located in Kyiv, as announced by the Managing Director of the Fund, Kristalina Georgieva.
"I am delighted to announce the reopening of the IMF Resident Representative Office in Kyiv, as we further deepen our engagement with Ukraine," she wrote on social media overnight on Wednesday.
Georgieva illustrated her post with a photo from the Kyiv office, showing the IMF team currently in Ukraine, led by Umunna Ramakrishnan, Deputy Director of the European Department of the Fund, Gavin Gray, Mission Chief, and Vagram Stepanyan, Permanent Representative of the IMF in Ukraine, along with the leadership of the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank of Ukraine.
As previously reported, the 4-year EFF program was approved on March 31 of this year, and the first tranche of $2.7 billion was disbursed at the beginning of April. The planned schedule of the program includes disbursements to Ukraine, after the first tranche, of three tranches of SDR 664 million (approximately $873 million at the current exchange rate) in mid-June and October of this year, and at the end of February of the following year based on the results of the first, second, and third reviews, evaluating the performance of commitments due at the end of April, June, and December of this year, respectively.
A mission from the IMF began work in Warsaw on September 25 to prepare for the program's second review. If the mission delivers a successful verdict, a decision on disbursing the third tranche of the EFF program could be made in the second half of October or November. However, Ukraine has not yet met all the structural benchmarks of the program necessary for its second review.
Since the start of the full-scale invasion by Russia and until recently, the IMF mission has been working outside of Ukraine, and its representation office in Kyiv was temporarily not operational.
