The US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund has approved its largest investment package for new projects, worth more than $60m.
This was reported by Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy.
The implementation of the projects is expected to help attract up to $1bn in additional capital from third-party investors.
The new projects focus on energy, critical minerals and dual-use technologies.
“We deliberately placed emphasis on areas such as energy resilience, building new value chains in the critical minerals sector, and strengthening the manufacturing base for dual-use technologies,” said Yehor Perelyhin, Deputy Minister of Economy and Environment of Ukraine.
Together with the Ukrainian company BGV Group Management, the Fund will create a platform for investment in mining projects. It will build a portfolio of early-stage projects in various regions of Ukraine.
The initial focus is on identified deposits of rare earth elements, uranium, beryllium and zirconium.
The platform is intended to help expand the extraction of strategic resources in Ukraine, create jobs, and attract Ukrainian and American entrepreneurs as well as international investors.
URIF will invest in a distributed combined heat and power generation project. It предусматривает the construction and operation of a number of community-level energy hubs.
Once commissioned, the facilities will serve thousands of households, including in areas where the war has made access to critical energy services more difficult.
Together with the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the Fund will provide debt financing for DTEK’s project to create electricity storage systems with a capacity of 200 MW / 400 MWh across six sites in Ukraine.
The system is already operating. Its capacity is sufficient to supply around 600,000 households for two hours.
The storage units will stabilise the grid, and US-made equipment will enable faster restoration of power supply after disruptions and provide backup power.
The new investment package was approved a year after the Fund’s launch. Ukraine and the United States each contributed $75m to its initial capital of $150m.
During this time, URIF has moved from establishing an institutional foundation to implementing its first investments. In March this year, the Fund made its first investment in the Ukrainian dual-use technology company Sine Engineering.
In addition, the DFC signed a cooperation agreement with the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) to develop a war-risk insurance mechanism.
URIF is a joint US-Ukrainian investment fund and one of the key elements of the economic partnership between the United States and Ukraine. The Fund brings together American and Ukrainian resources, experience and expertise to attract private capital from the US and other partner countries.