Ukraine Reforms Tracker Weekly — Issue 25
Editor's note: This is issue 25 of Ukrainian lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak's weekly "Ukraine Reforms Tracker" covering events from May 5–May 11, 2025. The digest highlights steps taken in the Ukrainian parliament related to business, economics, and international financial programs.
The Kyiv Independent is republishing with permission.
Ukraine misses customs reform deadline, jeopardizing IMF commitments
Ukraine's government has failed to launch the reboot of the State Customs Service, risking a key International Monetary Fund structural benchmark and putting up to $1.3 billion in international aid at risk.
Despite a legal requirement to form a selection commission for the new head of customs by Jan. 1, the Finance Ministry has not acted. According to MP Yaroslav Zhelezniak, the delay is being orchestrated by Finance Minister Serhii Marchenko and the Government Committee led by Economy Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko, reportedly under direct instructions from the President's Office to block the reform.
The continued inaction not only violates Ukrainian law but undermines commitments to the IMF, U.S., and World Bank, who have already disbursed funding tied to the reform. The IMF deadline for appointing a new customs chief by end-June 2025 is now considered unrealistic, raising the risk of future funding being withheld.
G7 backs ARMA reform bill, but parliament fails to add it to agenda again
The G7 ambassadors have voiced support for draft law #12374-d, aimed at overhauling Ukraine's Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA). The bill was developed under the leadership of MP Anastasiia Radina and is required under the EU's Ukraine Facility program.
Despite international backing, the bill was not included in this week's parliamentary agenda. Ukraine already missed the March 31 deadline for passage, putting 300 million euros in EU funding at risk.
Moreover, ARMA publicly questioned the bill, claiming international partners had raised concerns — an assertion at odds with the G7's public endorsement.
Ukraine ratifies U.S. critical minerals agreement, advances supporting legislation
On May 12, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the ratification of the critical minerals agreement between Ukraine and the United States, following unanimous support from all parliamentary factions.
Last week, parliament also passed in the first reading draft law #13256, which introduces amendments to the Budget Code to implement the agreement's provisions.
Read also: Ukraine, US sign additional agreements for minerals deal, Economy Ministry says
We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Sumy city under threat as Russian forces advance, Ukraine says
By Lidia Kelly (Reuters) -Russian forces have widened the frontline in Ukraine's northern region of Sumy, officials and analysts said, and Moscow said it captured another village on Tuesday, bringing the region's capital closer to within the range of frontline drones. The advance towards the city of Sumy - the administrative center of the Sumy region - comes as Kyiv showed its ability to continue fighting by conducting a series of strikes in recent days, hitting Russian strategic bombers and the Crimean Bridge. Russian and Ukrainian delegations met in Turkey for peace talks on Monday where Moscow said it would only agree to end the war if Kyiv cedes big new chunks of territory and accepts limits on the size of its army. On Tuesday, Russia's defense ministry said its forces took control of Andriivka, after capturing several other villages in recent days. Kyiv said Russian artillery attack on the city of Sumy killed four people and injured 28. The head of the military administration of the Sumy region, which lies north of Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv, held a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the region's defence strategy. "The situation in the border area of Sumy region remains complex, dynamic, but controllable," the head of the military administration, Oleh Hryhorov, said on Facebook. "The Russian army is constantly shelling border villages, hitting residential buildings, farms, and civilian infrastructure facilities." The dual advance with fierce frontline fighting and missile and drone strikes in Sumy hinders Ukraine's defence abilities along in the southeast Donbas region, of which Moscow is seeking full control, military analysts say. On Monday, Ivan Shevtsov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian brigades fighting in Sumy, told Ukrainian national broadcaster that Russian forces had captured about 15 km (9 miles) along the frontline, going 6-7 km deep. If Russian advances take the town of Yunakivka, Shevtsov said, the city of Sumy will be under a direct threat. The Ukrainian Deep State blog of analysts who track the front line using open sources said Russian forces are moving to within 20-25 km of Sumy, putting the city within a range of shorter-range attack drones. Reuters could not independently verify the Russian claim of capturing Andriivka and Ukraine's General Staff made no references to the village in its evening battlefield report. DeepState said early on Wednesday that Andriivka was now in Russian hands. Over the weekend, Sumy's authorities ordered mandatory evacuation of 11 additional villages due to escalating Russian attacks. Shevtsov said Russia wants to completely capture the Sumy region, not just make a small incursion. "Just ... like other regions in eastern Ukraine," he added. (Writing by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Reuters in Moscow; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Lincoln Feast.)
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Face the reality Trump: Negotiating with the likes of Putin is essentially making a deal with the devil
There's realpolitik. And then there's reality TV politik. There's foreign policy realism, of the kind associated with Henry Kissinger. And then there's Donald Trump's twist: real estate-ism. Anyone trying to assess the foreign policy of this White House needs to appreciate these distinctions. The various individuals responsible for national security in the Trump administration are united in their rejection of both the liberal idealism that informed the speeches (if not the actions) of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the neoconservative version of idealism that inspired George W. Bush's Global War on Terror. Yet there is much more to Trump 2.0 than the hard-nosed realism of Richard Nixon — a key influence on Trump. No previous president has livestreamed his Oval Office meetings with foreign leaders. That week in February when Trump hosted — and, to varying degrees, humiliated — the French president, the British prime minister, and the Ukrainian president introduced to great-power politics the unmistakable style of 'The Apprentice,' the TV show that made Trump a household name. As Trump acknowledged, his and Vice President JD Vance's shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, was 'great television.' Real-estate politics At the same time, the negotiations that he and his golfing friend Steve Witkoff are conducting in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East draw on an earlier chapter in Trump's career. As Witkoff explained to The Atlantic, he and Trump see diplomacy as functionally indistinguishable from doing real-estate deals. 'Diplomacy is negotiation,' Witkoff told Isaac Stanley-Becker. 'I've been doing it my whole life.' It is not difficult to ridicule the way Trump and Witkoff have approached the task of ending Russia's war against Ukraine, a task Trump insisted on the campaign trail that he could achieve within 24 hours. Witkoff's sycophantic interactions with President Vladimir Putin, a cold-blooded practitioner of realpolitik, have been painful to watch. His account of these interactions in an interview with Tucker Carlson was risible. The fact that the war has significantly escalated since Trump's peace initiative began — with Russian airstrikes reaching new peaks and Ukraine countering Sunday with an audacious drone attack on Russian strategic bomber bases — speaks for itself. 4 President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, July 7, 2017. AP Yes, Trump inherited a truly terrible strategic position from Joe Biden and his foreign policy team, who substituted 'de-escalation' for deterrence and watched as America's enemies inflicted harm on its friends in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel. A formidable Axis of Authoritarians emerged under the Biden presidency, uniting China, Iran, and North Korea in support of Russia's war. Even if the Original Sin of Biden's mental decline and its concealment did not impact foreign policy as much as domestic policy, he certainly was not equal to the task that confronted him. As Walter Russell Mead has rightly said: 'In 2023 and 2024 America needed a president who could explain . . . what we needed to do to stop the drift toward a new era of international confrontation. This is something Mr. Biden would have struggled with even if he were in full possession of his capacities; it was utterly beyond him in his diminished state.' Yet the failures of the recent past do not absolve us from asking if reality TV plus real estate adds up to a strategy. Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic lament that Trump is an imperialist who wants to carve up the world between the United States, Russia, and China. But it is hard to detect a coherent imperial project in the combination of territorial claims (on Canada, Greenland, and Panama), tariffs imposed as much on allies as on adversaries, and peace initiatives in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that are sometimes hard to distinguish from business deals. Distrust of top brass Trump is sometimes called an isolationist. I have never found this convincing. But I think it is true that, compared with almost every other president in the past century, he is deeply reluctant to use military force. This is partly out of a genuine horror of getting embroiled in one of those 'forever wars' that have haunted Americans from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But it is also because Trump learned in his first term not to trust the top brass of the US armed forces. He will never forgive Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for his communications with his Chinese counterpart in the run-up to the 2020 election and his condemnation of the subsequent Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol. The odd thing is that Trump's preference for peace over war does not truly reflect the sentiment of the electorate. Gallup polling shows that Americans today are quite strongly hostile to China and Russia (more so than to Iran or North Korea). According to a March 2025 poll, 46% of voters think the United States is not doing enough to help Ukraine in its war with Russia, up from 30% in December. While Democrats have soured on Israel, as a new Chicago Council survey reveals, around three-quarters of Republicans favor US military support for Israel not only 'until the hostages are returned' but also 'until Hamas is dismantled or destroyed.' And more than two-fifths (42%) of Republicans said last year that, in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, they would support 'using the US Navy to break a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, even if this might trigger a direct conflict between the United States and China.' 4 In this photo provided by Ukraine's 127th Separate Brigade of the Territorial Defense press service, soldiers fire toward Russian army positions near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Monday, June 2, 2025. AP A reluctant prez On all these issues, Trump is much less belligerent than his own base. He is strongly disinclined to continue US aid to Ukraine. He is so keen to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal that he now seems willing to allow Iran to carry on with low-level uranium enrichment. And we know from John Bolton's memoir, 'The Room Where It Happened,' that Trump would be very reluctant indeed to risk a war with China over Taiwan. This pacifism is one of the things that Trump's liberal critics seem unable to acknowledge. The notion that he is an imperialist or even a fascist flies in the face of the evidence that the man is a peacenik at heart. Put it this way: Fantasizing about wearing papal vestments is not the usual behavior of a bellicose autocrat. But making peace is historically harder than launching wars — or, for that matter, buying skyscrapers. Trump is learning this the painful way in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe. What kind of 'peace' does he envision in Ukraine? First, Ukraine will relinquish its claim to Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, along with all or most of Luhansk and Donetsk. Second, Ukraine will renounce the possibility of membership in NATO. Third, in place of a US military guarantee, Washington and Kyiv have signed an agreement that commits the United States to invest in Ukrainian natural resources. This might seem like a very sweet deal from Moscow's vantage point. It has certainly required major concessions by President Zelensky. And yet we seem no nearer to a cease-fire, much less a lasting peace, than we were on Inauguration Day more than four months ago. The reason is clear: Putin shows no sign of modifying his demands not only for territory but also to limit Ukraine's ability to arm and govern itself. Russia's goal is not just land; it is to render Ukraine defunct as an independent state. 4 President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky listen to Vice President JD Vance as they meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, February 28, 2025. AFP via Getty Images Despite his strong preference to blame Zelensky for the war and to woo Putin with the carrot of sanctions relief (and deals, deals, deals), Trump is being forced to admit that Putin is, in fact, the principal obstacle to peace. 'I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia,' the president declared on Truth Social on May 25, 'but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!' Unfortunately, the Russians must have read in the Financial Times about the TACO ('Trump Always Chickens Out') trade. The Russian response to Trump's threats was sarcastic. 'Trump's message leaves little room for misinterpretation,' Russian state media tweeted last Tuesday. 'Until he posts the opposite tomorrow morning.' When both FT and RT are laughing at you, something is wrong with your dealpolitik. South Korea or Vietnam The lesson of history is entirely clear: Wars are hard to stop — unless one side wins a decisive victory. With sustained Western support, Ukraine has a shot at being a version of South Korea. If America settles for an unsustainable peace, it will share the grim fate of South Vietnam. Neither outcome gets done quickly. It has often been argued that backing Ukraine was an extraordinary bargain for the United States. For a commitment of roughly $175 billion in assistance and Ukraine-related spending since the war began, Hal Brands has argued, the United States cleaned out stocks of aging weaponry, stimulated US production of 155 mm artillery shells, gave contracts worth $120 billion to US companies, and helped the Ukrainians kill around 200,000 Russian soldiers and destroy thousands of Russian tanks. Brands is right that, if the US had not acted when Putin invaded and the Ukrainians fought back, then eventually 'Ukraine would have fallen, allowing Moscow to create pervasive insecurity in Europe. Russia and China . . . would have had all the global momentum.' But the Biden administration at no point had a credible endgame. They failed to grasp that the longer the war dragged on, the more likely Russia was to grind down Ukraine — unless the West could somehow increase its military and financial support. Yet that was never politically plausible. On the contrary, it was predictable from the outset that Americans and Europeans would become 'fatigued' by the war — or perhaps just bored — if it dragged on for much more than a year. 4 Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting of board of trustees of Talent and Success foundation at the Sirius Park of Science and Art after his phone talks with President Donald Trump on Monday, May 19, 2025. AP No incentive to stop The Trump solution seemed simple: End the war. But the reality is that unless the US and EU apply serious pressure to Russia, Putin has no incentive to end the war. Up until this point, the much-vaunted sanctions imposed on Russia by the West since February 2022 have been a case study in the limits of economic coercion. Russia has made more from selling energy to Europe in the last three years than Ukraine has received in aid from the EU. At the same time, European countries continue to export large quantities of goods to Russia via third countries, most of them in Central Asia. Four steps could be taken immediately to toughen the sanctions regime — and incentivize Putin to end the war. First, the US could follow Europe's lead in expanding sanctions on Russia's tanker fleet and the companies that provide services to these tankers. Keep up with today's most important news Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters Second, the US could impose tighter restrictions on Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Third, the US could place additional large Russian firms on the Specially Designated Nationals blacklist, as the Biden administration did with Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas in January. (An obvious target could be Gazprom, though the European states that continue to buy Russian gas would strongly oppose such a move.) Fourth, the Trump administration could make good on its threats to impose 'secondary tariffs' on Russian oil imported by other countries. That could easily form part of the current US trade talks with India. David vs. Goliath These and other measures would inflict pain on a Russian war economy that is already showing clear signs of overextension. I hope the Trump administration is seriously considering at least some of these steps. But I see little sign that it is. Diplomacy turns out to be quite different from reality TV and real estate. The best diplomacy is conducted secretly, not on live TV. And when a national security strategy goes awry, bankruptcy is not an option. There is no Chapter 11 for a failed foreign policy. The fall of Kyiv is not an event anyone in Washington — or in Brussels — wants to contemplate. Those sympathetic to Ukraine want to believe that, with a combination of Western aid and Ukrainian ingenuity, David can get the better of Goliath. Those — not least Trump — who would rather do deals with Goliath want to believe that, with a little help from Steve Witkoff, Goliath can be persuaded to shake hands with David and call it quits. Neither of these views is realistic. If anything, the Trump view is the less realistic of the two. I could be wrong. Perhaps the administration will surprise me by belatedly applying serious economic pressure to Russia. But if Ukraine ultimately goes the way of South Vietnam, I doubt future historians will be flattering. Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Oil Bulls Bite Back as Prices Defy Expectations
OPEC+ did what everyone expected it to do last weekend, announcing another production ramp-up. Prices, however, did something that not everyone expected them to do: they went up. All eyes are now on demand—and the disruption of supply. The eight members of OPEC+ that were keeping their production of crude oil under restraints agreed on Saturday to add another 411,000 barrels daily to their combined total in July after making identical agreements for May and June. The news followed speculation reported by the media that the cartel could add more barrels this time just to teach everyone a lesson. That speculation had weakened prices. The OPEC+ decision essentially had no effect on them. But events that coincided with the OPEC+ meeting did have an effect. First, there was the Ukrainian drone attack on targets within Russia. The attack prompted expectations of more, with the targets this time part of Russia's oil infrastructure, leading to supply disruptions. Then there is the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, which just got more unlikely, with media reporting Iran was about to reject the latest proposal of the United States. This, in turn, means, that U.S. sanctions against the country will remain in place, notably the noose around Iran's oil industry. Iran was not going to agree to completely halt its uranium enrichment activities, which the U.S. has proposed as a condition for reaching a deal, Reuters reported, so the prospect of a deal became distant add to the bullish developments, wildfire season in Alberta has started prompting production shutdowns, to date affecting more than 340,000 barrels daily. This is equal to 7% of the total, Reuters noted, but it has been enough to fuel a price rally—and imply that demand for oil is healthier than many like to argue. Reuters' Clyde Russell, in his latest column, noted that oil imports into Asia have been weaker so far this year than a year ago and suggested OPEC+'s latest production hike came at a bad time in terms of demand. Russell wondered if the OPEC+ members hiking production would 'find buyers for the additional oil,' in light of Asian oil imports in May slipping lower from April, to an estimated 24.2 million barrels daily from 24.85 million barrels daily. In light of the abovementioned geopolitical developments, chances are the answer to that question is 'yes'—and that additional oil may fetch better prices, too. Because once again, oil market players were reminded that it's not so important what this forecaster or another says about demand and how global supply exceeds it. It's important what happens in the real, physical world, and in that world, demand for oil remains as robust as it has been since the end of the pandemic lockdowns, the gradual weakening of China's appetite for crude notwithstanding. 'Demand is set to pick up as we move into the summer months, suggesting prices are likely to remain relatively well supported,' ING commodity analysts wrote in a new note today, after earlier this week Goldman Sachs somewhat grudgingly acknowledged seasonal oil demand patterns that point to equally stronger prices ahead. 'Relatively tight spot oil fundamentals, beats in hard global activity data, and seasonal summer support to oil demand suggest that the expected demand slowdown is unlikely to be sharp enough to stop raising production when deciding on August production levels on July 6th,' the bank said in a note Monday. Indeed, not only is geopolitics making oil bears nervous, but summer driving season is advancing, and the shock of Trump's tariff-first approach to trade policies is subsiding. Oil is currently quite affordable, which would stimulate demand, and its immediate supply outlook is uncertain, which often acts as fuel for prices. By Irina Slav for More Top Reads From this article on Sign in to access your portfolio
