Before I begin this week’s blog, I must apologise if I sound a bit frustrated. Sometimes it’s just hard to stay positive. As many of you know, I’ve now been in Kyiv for over two years working on a roadmap for the reconstruction of Ukrainian towns and villages, while also promoting plans, policy and strategies on how to make Russia pay for all their destruction.

Along the way, I’ve met many incredible people with wonderful hearts and talent eager to help Ukraine any way they can. These amazing folks have united under the Peace Coalition banner to solve the complex problems of rebuilding broken communities and returning displaced people to their homes.  We’ve also devoted countless hours and brain cells on determining how to make Russia pay for the damage.

If it’s easy, it ain’t worth doing

Reconstruction and recovery was never going to be an easy task, but it’s even harder when you are doing it on your own dime. The Peace Coalition has been a completely volunteer effort and a monumental one at that. Over one hundred professionals have written dozens of whitepapers and spent countless hours determining everything that must be done to finance Ukraine’s reconstruction and ensure that the recovery process is as transparent and seamless as possible.

When you visit a town that’s been heavily damaged by Russians and meet people who are now living in their hastily rebuilt garden sheds, your heart absolutely breaks. You then get angry, and then get to work. It’s easy to think about reconstruction as a matter of hammers and nails, windows and roofs, but when you dig deeper you realize that it’s so much more.

No place to call home

Homes must be rebuilt, but how is that accomplished safely when the entire community is mined? Small local businesses like farms and shops must be rejuvenated to provide jobs and the essentials of life for returnees, but how is that done that when neighbourhoods are contaminated by munitions and environmental hazards? How do you rebuild the local grocery store before there are enough locals to buy groceries?

Schools, hospitals, community buildings and essential infrastructure like power lines and bridges are all destroyed and must be rebuilt before any other kind of recovery can begin. Our task is not for the faint of heart and it’s really difficult to promise to help innocent people when the powerful people with the money aren’t there to back you up.

No help here or there

Let’s start with the Ukrainian government as they are the obvious choice to finance recovery. However, there’s a far more urgent use for any money they do have: winning the war and making sure people like civil servants, pensioners, teachers and doctors who’ve stayed in Ukraine receive their monthly salaries and continue to survive. The war has displaced over a third of Ukraine’s population so that means 33% fewer people working and paying taxes. The government is currently running a monthly deficit of $5 billion and relying on loans from the International Monetary Fund and donors like the World Bank just to keep the lights on. No help there.

International donors have money to spend but they either don’t want to take the risk of rebuilding communities that may just get destroyed again, or their own internal procurement procedures make it almost impossible to spend the money they have pledged. No help there either.

According to the UN Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, aggression against another sovereign nation is illegal and the aggressor is liable for all damage done. The G7+ governments and indeed all 193 countries that have signed the UN Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms have an obligation to punish Russia for its illegal behaviour by enacting collective countermeasures to bring Russia back into line that feature seizing sanctioned assets including $190 billion in cash stored in the Euroclear payment system headquartered in Brussels. So far not a single Russian dollar has been seized and likely never will be. No help yet again.

Private cowboys to the rescue

So how do groups like the Peace Coalition and the hundreds of other NGOs and humanitarian groups fund their efforts in Ukraine?  Sadly, when our governments aren’t able or willing to provide anything other than military aid to Ukraine (which suffers from its own delays), equivocation and excuses, the private sector must step up.

Ukraine is now entering its 11^th year of war with Russia and there’s no clear end in sight, but recent events such as Ukrainians taking the war to Russian soil in Kursk show there’s still hope they will eventually prevail. Our governments still ostensibly support Ukraine but continue to tie the military’s hands with limits on the use of long-range weapons. So, Russia continues its missile and drone strikes on civilians and the energy grid, ensuring another long winter in the garden shed.

Weapons are great but war is more than victory on the battlefield. War is about victory over tyranny & aggression and a return to peaceful life. If international governments and donors cannot find a way to fund the peace, what’s the purpose of fighting in the first place?

When we’re let down by our politicians, we can vote them out and that may indeed happen but for now, it’s time for private investors to fund the peace that will follow the war financed by our governments. Some may call this war profiteering, but that’s ultimately what our governments are doing. Private investors must now step up and Profit from Peace…and actually that has a nice ring to it.

Slava Ukraini! Heroaim Slava!