Sweden has a wide range of mechanical engineering, which is important for the recovery of Ukraine.
Date: 2023-08-20 Author: Кирило Загоруйко Categories: RECONSTRUCTION
Rostislav Shurma, Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said this on the air of the national telethon "United News", commenting on reaching an agreement during a meeting between the President of Ukraine and the Prime Minister of Sweden.
“Sweden has very good not only military technologies, but primarily engineering technologies. Moreover, a very wide range of heavy engineering is mining equipment, this is classic trucks, everyone knows brands like Volvo. This is good electronics equipment, Electrolux equipment, this The world-famous company ABB is electrical engineering, therefore Sweden has the whole range of engineering, a complete portfolio, which, in fact, is extremely important and critical for the restoration of Ukraine's infrastructure, and for the construction of new enterprises and factories," Shurma said.
He noted that usually this equipment is sold not only as engineering solutions, but together with financial packages, which are provided through export credit agencies.
"And this is exactly one of the issues that we raised today with the Swedish side in order to really expand credit limits and launch full-fledged cooperation and financing programs through export credit agencies," Shurma said.
He recalled that there are positive examples of such cooperation, including with Italy and Japan, which through their agencies have opened large limits of more than a billion dollars, and the development of specific projects is currently underway.
“Actually, we want to implement the same experience with Sweden, since there are a huge number of companies with good equipment from Volvo, Sandvik, SKF, Alfa Laval, Atlas Copco and dozens of others, equipment that will be interesting for the restoration of Ukraine,” Shurma said.
According to him, we are talking about billions of dollars of assistance, but during the current visit, the focus of the discussion was focused on the private sector.
“That is, specific private companies should make decisions about what kind of investments to make. And if we take the entire portfolio that we discussed, as well as some other segments, in particular, I would also like to focus on green metallurgy, because it is Swedish companies such as SSAB, H2 Green Steel, they were pioneers in the world, they were the first to announce plans to switch to green steel production technology. This is potentially billions of dollars more. Accordingly, our task is to create such conditions that it would be profitable for these companies to come to Ukraine," said the Deputy Head of the Office of the President.
According to him, the Swedish side at the first stages must make certain political decisions for this.
"We see that these are several dozen areas and projects worth 5, 6, 7, 8 billion euros. But we will talk about specific numbers when there are already specific projects," Shurma said.
According to him, Ukraine may be of interest to Western partners precisely from the point of view of large resources: territory, qualifications of people, deposits of minerals, in particular, such as lithium, graphite. Not the last factor, according to him, there are logistics issues.
On Saturday, August 19, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky is on a working visit to Sweden, where he met with Prime Minister of Sweden Ulf Kristersson.
