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What Ukraine's Washington delegation signalled on 15 April 2022
Summary
A look back at the day Kyiv announced a senior team for the IMF and World Bank meetings, amid military threats and diplomatic moves in the preceding days.
What did Ukraine want from Washington's financial meetings? On 15 April 2022, Kyiv announced that a group of senior officials would travel to the US capital the following week for the gatherings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The delegation was to include the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, the finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko, and the head of the National Bank, Kyrylo Shevchenko. Discussions there were expected to centre on the Russian invasion and its effect on the global economy.
A week of military and diplomatic signals
The announcement followed several developments in the preceding days. On 13 April, the Russian defence ministry said it would begin to target Ukrainian "decision-makers", including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and command centres in Kyiv if Ukrainian forces continued to attack Russian territory. The same day, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said US and NATO vehicles transporting weapons on Ukrainian territory were "legal military targets".
The warnings came as Washington announced further security assistance worth $800m (€740m). The package included 11 Mi-17 helicopters, 18 155mm howitzers, 300 additional Switchblade drones and radar systems able to track incoming fire and pinpoint its source. As reported at the time, some officials in the Biden administration had considered such a step too risky in terms of escalation only a few weeks earlier.
Visitors to Kyiv and talk of a summit
Also on 13 April, the presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (Andrzej Duda, Gitanas Nausėda, Egils Levits and Alar Karis) arrived in Kyiv and met Zelenskyy.
On 14 April, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said Turkey was still working on organising a potential meeting between Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. No such meeting was reported as agreed.
Elsewhere in the region, Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin said on 13 April that Finland would decide on NATO membership within weeks, after Russia had warned it against joining the alliance.
The economic fallout abroad
The economic theme that Kyiv wanted to bring to Washington was visible beyond Ukraine's borders. On 14 April, Egypt's agriculture minister, El Sayed El Quseir, announced that India had approved Egyptian imports of wheat because of the shortage caused by the invasion. On 13 April, Colombian president Iván Duque, responding to US President Joe Biden's description of the war as genocide, said in an interview that what was happening in Ukraine was genocide and had to stop. This came after Colombia increased energy production to help meet Western demand once all supplies from Russia had been cut off.
Taken together, the reports from 13 to 15 April show a war being pursued on several fronts at once: threats against Kyiv, expanded Western arms deliveries, tentative diplomacy and mounting pressure on global supplies. Ukraine's decision to send its prime minister, finance minister and central bank chief to the IMF and World Bank meetings placed the economic consequences of the invasion on the agenda of those institutions' gatherings the following week.
