Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

The largest creditor is the European Union. Ukraine’s debt to EU institutions multiplied eightfold between February 2022 and end-2024 — from USD 5 billion to USD 43 billion, or USD 51 billion including the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. [1] In April 2026, the European Council approved a further EUR 90 billion (USD 105 billion) loan, interest Interest An amount paid in remuneration of an investment or received by a lender. Interest is calculated on the amount of the capital invested or borrowed, the duration of the operation and the rate that has been set. -free to Ukraine in all circumstances, with principal repayable only once Russia pays war reparations to Ukraine. [2] The EU now holds 44% of Ukraine’s external public debt. The World Bank World Bank
WB The World Bank was founded as part of the new international monetary system set up at Bretton Woods in 1944. Its capital is provided by member states’ contributions and loans on the international money markets. It financed public and private projects in Third World and East European countries.

It consists of several closely associated institutions, among which :

1. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, 189 members in 2017), which provides loans in productive sectors such as farming or energy ;

2. The International Development Association (IDA, 159 members in 1997), which provides less advanced countries with long-term loans (35-40 years) at very low interest (1%) ;

3. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), which provides both loan and equity finance for business ventures in developing countries.

As Third World Debt gets worse, the World Bank (along with the IMF) tends to adopt a macro-economic perspective. For instance, it enforces adjustment policies that are intended to balance heavily indebted countries’ payments. The World Bank advises those countries that have to undergo the IMF’s therapy on such matters as how to reduce budget deficits, round up savings, enduce foreign investors to settle within their borders, or free prices and exchange rates.

and IMF IMF
International Monetary Fund Along with the World Bank, the IMF was founded on the day the Bretton Woods Agreements were signed. Its first mission was to support the new system of standard exchange rates.

When the Bretton Wood fixed rates system came to an end in 1971, the main function of the IMF became that of being both policeman and fireman for global capital: it acts as policeman when it enforces its Structural Adjustment Policies and as fireman when it steps in to help out governments in risk of defaulting on debt repayments.

As for the World Bank, a weighted voting system operates: depending on the amount paid as contribution by each member state. 85% of the votes is required to modify the IMF Charter (which means that the USA with 17,68% % of the votes has a de facto veto on any change).

The institution is dominated by five countries: the United States (16,74%), Japan (6,23%), Germany (5,81%), France (4,29%) and the UK (4,29%).
The other 183 member countries are divided into groups led by one country. The most important one (6,57% of the votes) is led by Belgium. The least important group of countries (1,55% of the votes) is led by Gabon and brings together African countries.

http://imf.org together hold a further 33%. [3] In exchange for this financing, the Ukrainian government has accepted 325 conditionalities and 531 monitoring indicators, administered through a National Coordinator who acts as a single point of contact for the European Commission, monitoring implementation on a monthly basis. [4]

This is not solidarity. It is the standard toolkit the EU deploys against peripheral economies — the same instruments applied to Greece after 2010, to Eastern Europe’s post-accession states, to the Global South through the IMF programmes the EU underwrites. CADTM has documented this toolkit for decades. Ukraine is not an exception to the pattern. It is the latest economy to which the EU has extended it — using the imperative of wartime support as the occasion to deepen integration on its own terms. Russia denies Ukraine’s existence as a nation. The West does not deny that existence — it subordinates it to its own interests. These are not equivalent forms of domination, and treating them as equivalent is an error made by parts of the left that have offered no solidarity to Ukrainians fighting for their survival. But refusing that equivalence does not require treating EU subordination as solidarity. It requires naming it precisely: not friendship, but a more sophisticated form of the same imperial relationship the West has imposed on dependent economies elsewhere. The question is not whether to support Ukraine. Ukraine has the right to defend its national independence against imperialist invasion — a position the left must hold without equivocation. The question is on what terms, and in whose interests, that support has been structured.

The United States arrived at its own arrangement earlier and differently. The Trump administration eliminated Ukraine aid from its 2026 Pentagon budget request and secured a minerals deal — signed 30 April 2025 and ratified by the Verkhovna Rada on 8 May, establishing a joint US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund Investment fund
Investment funds Private equity investment funds (sometimes called ’mutual funds’ seek to invest in companies according to certain criteria; of which they most often are specialized: capital-risk, capital development funds, leveraged buy-out (LBO), which reflect the different levels of the company’s maturity. into which Ukraine contributes 50% of revenues from new extraction licences, with future US military assistance counting as a US capital contribution to the fund. [5] Where US military transfers continue, they flow increasingly through the NATO NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO ensures US military protection for the Europeans in case of aggression, but above all it gives the USA supremacy over the Western Bloc. Western European countries agreed to place their armed forces within a defence system under US command, and thus recognize the preponderance of the USA. NATO was founded in 1949 in Washington, but became less prominent after the end of the Cold War. In 2002, it had 19 members: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, the USA, to which were added Greece and Turkey in 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955 (replaced by Unified Germany in 1990), Spain in 1982, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in 1999. PURL mechanism. The EU lends Ukraine money; Ukraine uses it to purchase weapons from US manufacturers. The US arms industry profits from sales for which it carries no credit risk. Ukraine carries the debt. The EU functions as intermediary — financier of a procurement chain in which American capital extracts value without appearing as a creditor. [6] Washington extracted its concession and stepped back. The EU remained — as financier, as creditor, as the architect of Ukraine’s post-war economic integration. Where the EU once supplied arms directly, it now lends Ukraine the money to buy them itself — 75% of the 2025 procurement budget went to Ukrainian manufacturers. This gives the EU as creditor leverage Leverage This is the ratio between funds borrowed for investment and the personal funds or equity that backs them up. A company may have borrowed much more than its capitalized value, in which case it is said to be ’highly leveraged’. The more highly a company is leveraged, the higher the risk associated with lending to the company; but higher also are the possible profits that it may realise as compared with its own value. not only over Ukraine’s state budget but over its military-industrial base, an asset Asset Something belonging to an individual or a business that has value or the power to earn money (FT). The opposite of assets are liabilities, that is the part of the balance sheet reflecting a company’s resources (the capital contributed by the partners, provisions for contingencies and charges, as well as the outstanding debts). increasingly coveted amid Europe’s own rearmament drive — and, as Quantum Systems discovered in May 2026 when it was barred from Western markets for resisting joint-venture terms, conditionality extends to the absorption of Ukrainian defence-tech intellectual property as well. [7]

Éric Toussaint, writing for CADTM in January 2025, drew a contrast between the US approach — grants and arms — and the EU approach — loans and conditionality. [8] That contrast was always partial: the US provided substantial budgetary support through USAID alongside military transfers, and the Biden-era G7 ERA loan programme — a collective USD 50 billion with the EU as the largest contributor at EUR 35 billion (USD 38 billion) — was itself structured as debt, serviced from windfall interest income on frozen Russian assets at Euroclear in Brussels. [9] The EU disbursed its ERA share Share A unit of ownership interest in a corporation or financial asset, representing one part of the total capital stock. Its owner (a shareholder) is entitled to receive an equal distribution of any profits distributed (a dividend) and to attend shareholder meetings. by November 2025. What has changed since Toussaint wrote is that the US has moved from arms and financial transfers to extraction, leaving the EU as the dominant financier in both the military and civilian domains, but on loan terms throughout.

The reparations-contingent structure of the April 2026 loan deserves scrutiny. Ukraine does not service the principal unless Russia pays reparations — an outcome that may never occur. Two-thirds of the loan is earmarked for military acquisitions, as Jean Batou and I noted in a companion analysis: “the EU once supplied arms directly to Ukraine; now it lends Ukraine money so it can buy them itself.” [10] In that sense the loan’s economic substance is closer to a conditional grant than to conventional sovereign debt Sovereign debt Government debts or debts guaranteed by the government. . But the conditionality regime attached to it operates regardless: the 325 reform commitments, the monthly monitoring, the accession requirements, the National Coordinator reporting to Brussels. The EU holds structural leverage over Ukraine’s policy choices through conditionality, not through debt service Debt service The sum of the interests and the amortization of the capital borrowed. pressure on this instrument. There is also a direct EU financial interest in the outcome of any peace settlement: if Russia pays, the EU budget recovers EUR 90 billion; if Russia does not, the EU absorbs the loss — and under OECD OECD
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, created in 1960. It includes the major industrialized countries and has 34 members as of January 2016.

http://www.oecd.org/about/membersandpartners/ DAC rules, any loan repayment the EU forgives counts as Official Development Assistance ODA
Official Development Assistance Official Development Assistance is the name given to loans granted in financially favourable conditions by the public bodies of the industrialized countries. A loan has only to be agreed at a lower rate of interest than going market rates (a concessionary loan) to be considered as aid, even if it is then repaid to the last cent by the borrowing country. Tied bilateral loans (which oblige the borrowing country to buy products or services from the lending country) and debt cancellation are also counted as part of ODA. Apart from food aid, there are three main ways of using these funds: rural development, infrastructures and non-project aid (financing budget deficits or the balance of payments). The latter increases continually. This aid is made “conditional” upon reduction of the public deficit, privatization, environmental “good behaviour”, care of the very poor, democratization, etc. These conditions are laid down by the main governments of the North, the World Bank and the IMF. The aid goes through three channels: multilateral aid, bilateral aid and the NGOs. . This gives EU institutions a structural stake in ensuring Russia is held to account — complicating, within Europe, any tendency toward early normalisation of relations with Moscow and a return to business as usual. [11]

The broader debt architecture, which predates the April 2026 loan and will outlast it, carries conventional repayment obligations. Ukraine’s total public debt reached USD 213.3 billion at end-2025 — approximately 100% of GDP GDP
Gross Domestic Product Gross Domestic Product is an aggregate measure of total production within a given territory equal to the sum of the gross values added. The measure is notoriously incomplete; for example it does not take into account any activity that does not enter into a commercial exchange. The GDP takes into account both the production of goods and the production of services. Economic growth is defined as the variation of the GDP from one period to another. , up from 50% in 2021, and projected to reach 106% by end-2026. [12] The IMF charges rates of up to 8% including surcharges; Ukraine reimbursed nearly USD 9 billion to the IMF in the three years from 2022 to 2024 alone. [13] GDP-linked securities issued in the 2015 restructuring, held by private creditors, require payments of up to USD 2 billion per year if growth exceeds 3%, running until 2041. In 2026, debt servicing is the second largest item in Ukraine’s budget after defence.

The fiscal arithmetic reveals the structural trap. Because own revenues cover only defence, all civilian state functions are permanently loan-dependent. After any ceasefire, the Russian threat will not have disappeared; Ukraine’s own revenues will continue to go to defence. The civilian dependency on foreign lending is not a transitional phase within a wartime budget. It is the structural condition of the post-war state. Yuliya Yurchenko, in the May 2023 forum co-published by CADTM and Tempest, identified what this means for any future government: “even if the most well-meaning people come to power, they will be in the straitjacket of that conditionality. They will be economically paralyzed by the need to prioritize repayment of debt and interest on debt rather than prioritizing the needs of its people.” [14] The straitjacket has tightened since she said it. The April 2026 loan adds EUR 90 billion before reconstruction begins.

Toussaint drew the Greek comparison in 2023: the European Commission is reproducing with Ukraine what it did with Greece after 2010 — loans, conditionalities, and permanent surveillance in the interests of Western European capital. [15] Greece’s debt-to-GDP rose from 103% in 2007 to 180% at peak; GDP contracted 25%; unemployment peaked at 27.5%. Ukraine’s debt-to-GDP has moved from 50% to 100% in four years, from a war-shattered base. The IMF has itself assessed Ukrainian debt as unsustainable. Sushovan Dhar, at the same forum, placed Ukraine in the queue alongside Sri Lanka, Zambia, Pakistan, and Ghana — countries the IMF and World Bank will not cancel for, because cancellation would set a precedent for every country equally entitled to it. [16] The left must resist the impulse to treat Ukraine as a special case. It is not.

The same process operates at household level, with less visibility. Ukraine’s housing crisis — produced by destruction, displacement, and the collapse of construction — has been met by the state with a subsidised mortgage Mortgage A loan made against property collateral. There are two sorts of mortgages:
1) the most common form where the property that the loan is used to purchase is used as the collateral;
2) a broader use of property to guarantee any loan: it is sufficient that the borrower possesses and engages the property as collateral. scheme. The eOselya programme, launched October 2022, offers mortgages at 3% for military personnel and 7% for other eligible categories, rising to 10% after year eleven. Housing researcher Vita Shnaider — social anthropologist, co-founder of the NGO New Housing Policy, and co-organiser of the Renters Union in Ukraine — in a February 2025 FEPS policy study reviewed by Yurchenko, documented its failure in precise terms: only 2.3% of eOselya beneficiaries were internally displaced persons at the time of Shnaider’s study — the population most in need; by end-2025, the share had risen only marginally, with 909 IDPs among 7,769 loans issued that year (11.7%), while military personnel and their families continued to account for the majority of borrowers. The programme requires a minimum 20% down payment and verified fixed income; by October 2025, more than 20,000 loans had been issued totalling over UAH 35 billion (USD 840 million). [17] Of the flats purchased, 69.1% were bought from resellers rather than new construction. Shnaider traces this back to 2009 crisis legislation: a Ukrainian state tradition of calling developer subsidies “affordable housing,” in which affordability for the most vulnerable is structurally excluded. Alona Liasheva, writing in Commons/Spilne at the start of the full-scale invasion, named the underlying logic: “the affordability of housing and profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. from construction are mutually exclusive things. Housing is a basic need, not a source of profit, not a financial asset.” [18] That remains true in 2026. The pre-war model in which 95% of Ukrainians owned their homes has begun to fracture: by 2024, homeownership had fallen to 79%, renters had risen to 14%, and 42% of households reported difficulty paying for housing. [19]

Below the mortgage market, the microloan sector has expanded explosively. Outstanding microloan debt reached UAH 25.15 billion (USD 604 million) by end-2025, up 25% in that year alone; in the third quarter of 2025, two million microloans were issued. [20] The average loan is approximately USD 155 — before-payday borrowing to cover electronics, food, basic consumption. Approximately 36% of consumer loans are already non-performing. [21] As Tkalich summarises, reporting in April 2026 on the Yurchenko/FEPS study: “This is no longer a story about investing in the future, but about surviving on expensive debt.” [22]

The parallel with Sri Lanka is instructive and has been documented through CADTM’s own network. In Sri Lanka, effective microfinance rates reached 220%, and 2.4 million people — 2.3 million of them women — were trapped in the system. Women from across the country staged strikes and satyagrahas for years, developing a programme through the struggle: cancellation of all microfinance loans; an immediate halt to loan recovery pending an independent audit of predatory lenders; cessation of legal action against debtors; removal from credit blacklists; the establishment of a financial system centred on social wellbeing. [23] Amali Wedagedara, writing for CADTM in 2023, drew the structural lesson from the Sri Lankan government’s attempt to regulate its way out of the crisis: regulation that leaves big finance companies free to engage in micro-lending while disciplining community credit providers and cooperatives protects the perpetrators and eliminates the alternatives. The demand is exclusion of big finance from micro-lending altogether, combined with development of community-based credit. [24] Ukrainian left movements have not yet built equivalent campaigns around MFO regulation. The experience documented through CADTM’s network provides a ready framework.

The political choice behind both debt traps — sovereign and household — is the same. Rather than taxing those who have profited from the war, the Zelensky government borrows, imposing the cost on the Ukrainian population over decades. Domestic bonds issued during the war carried rates of up to 16.5%, purchased by oligarchs’ banks — the wealthy lending to the state at profit while the population bears the repayment burden. [25] There has been no significant tax on corporations that have benefited from the war economy inside Ukraine; the seizure of oligarch assets that could finance resistance and reconstruction has not occurred, because it runs against the sanctity of private property that Western governments and the EU are unwilling to challenge. The EU’s conditionality locks in this settlement: the 325 reforms require further privatisation, opening of public procurement, and adaptation to EU frameworks that, as Toussaint notes, guarantee market competition but contain no binding social rights, no minimum wage convergence, no fiscal harmonisation. [26]

European governments face an equivalent choice. Arms manufacturers across Europe have extracted extraordinary returns from the war. Rheinmetall’s share price rose from under EUR 100 (USD 108) before the invasion and has since stabilised at approximately EUR 1,190–1,200 (USD 1,285–1,296) — a more than tenfold increase — with revenues of EUR 9.8 billion (USD 10.6 billion) in 2024, up 39%. [27] Several European private banks have been equally opportunistic: Austrian Raiffeisen, German Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, and Italian Unicredit and Intesa Sanpaolo “continued operating in the Russian Federation” despite sanctions and “multiplied their profits in that country fourfold since the start of the invasion,” as Toussaint documents — while Raiffeisen simultaneously serves as one of eleven official primary dealers of Ukrainian sovereign debt. [28] No European government has proposed a windfall tax on either the arms manufacturers or the banks profiting on both sides of the war. A special levy on the additional war profits of European arms companies would generate resources sufficient to fund Ukraine through grants rather than loans. None has been proposed.

Beyond the arms and banking sectors, the same pattern of profit without taxation extends to commodities Commodities The goods exchanged on the commodities market, traditionally raw materials such as metals and fuels, and cereals. and reconstruction. The four major grain multinationals controlling 80% of global cereal grain trade have profited from wartime commodity price movements. Gas and oil companies made substantial additional profits from European energy market disruption. Michael Roberts, writing on CADTM in February 2026, described where the reconstruction process itself is heading: the aim is to restore the Ukrainian economy “as a form of special economic zone, with public money to cover any potential losses for private capital. Ukraine will be made free of trade unions, any severe business tax regimes and regulations and any other major obstacles to profitable investments by Western capital in alliance with former Ukrainian oligarchs.” [29] The process is already under way: 28% of Ukraine’s arable land is now owned by a combination of Ukrainian oligarchs, European and North American corporations, and the sovereign wealth fund Sovereign Wealth Fund A sovereign wealth fund or SWF is an investment fund owned by a State. It is funded by exports of high-value raw materials or by large trade-balance surpluses. In 2013, such funds managed approximately $5.2 trillion in assets. of Saudi Arabia. [30]

To this programme must now be added the demands that Ukrainian researchers have articulated and that the data makes plain: grant-based financing for resistance and reconstruction; replacement of the eOselya mortgage scheme with a genuine social housing system; and regulation of predatory microfinance on the model that Sri Lankan women’s movements have developed through years of organised struggle. Ukrainian law has already recognised the principle of preferential treatment for military-affected groups — veterans, the wounded, and families of the killed — in consumer credit obligations, through a legislative proposal tabled in the Verkhovna Rada in February 2025. [31] That principle needs to be extended to all those whose livelihoods, homes, and savings have been destroyed by the war: internally displaced persons, the disabled, single-parent households, the long-term unemployed. The wartime explosion of household debt is itself an argument for a broader moratorium on debt recovery for vulnerable groups — not only restructuring rights, but suspension of collection, removal from credit blacklists, and an audit of predatory lending practices, on the model the Sri Lankan Collective of Women Affected by Microfinance fought for over years of organised struggle. [32]

CADTM has argued since March 2022 that Ukraine’s debt should be cancelled. The campaign is anchored in a petition initiated by Ukrainian citizens — cancel-ukrainian-debt.org — launched in coalition with Sotsialnyi Rukh and international solidarity organisations including Debt Justice. The site remains active, publishing ongoing analysis including on the GDP warrant default and the three-year debt suspension that the campaign helped achieve in July 2022. The legal basis for the cancellation demand draws on the doctrine of odious debt Odious Debt According to the doctrine, for a debt to be odious it must meet two conditions:
1) It must have been contracted against the interests of the Nation, or against the interests of the People, or against the interests of the State.
2) Creditors cannot prove they they were unaware of how the borrowed money would be used.

We must underline that according to the doctrine of odious debt, the nature of the borrowing regime or government does not signify, since what matters is what the debt is used for. If a democratic government gets into debt against the interests of its population, the contracted debt can be called odious if it also meets the second condition. Consequently, contrary to a misleading version of the doctrine, odious debt is not only about dictatorial regimes.

(See Éric Toussaint, The Doctrine of Odious Debt : from Alexander Sack to the CADTM).

The father of the odious debt doctrine, Alexander Nahum Sack, clearly says that odious debts can be contracted by any regular government. Sack considers that a debt that is regularly incurred by a regular government can be branded as odious if the two above-mentioned conditions are met.
He adds, “once these two points are established, the burden of proof that the funds were used for the general or special needs of the State and were not of an odious character, would be upon the creditors.”

Sack defines a regular government as follows: “By a regular government is to be understood the supreme power that effectively exists within the limits of a given territory. Whether that government be monarchical (absolute or limited) or republican; whether it functions by “the grace of God” or “the will of the people”; whether it express “the will of the people” or not, of all the people or only of some; whether it be legally established or not, etc., none of that is relevant to the problem we are concerned with.”

So clearly for Sack, all regular governments, whether despotic or democratic, in one guise or another, can incur odious debts. , formulated by the Russian jurist Alexander Sack in 1927 and taken up and radicalised by CADTM since 2008. Sack’s two criteria are straightforward: a debt is odious if it was contracted against the interests of the population, and if creditors were aware of this — or could not demonstrate ignorance of it. Under those criteria, as Toussaint established, Ukraine’s pre-war debt was odious: contracted to finance neoliberal policies against the interests of the Ukrainian population, enriching a privileged minority through privatisation of public goods, with creditors fully aware that the loans served the general interest of capital, not of Ukraine. [33] The post-February 2022 accumulation is odious by the same criteria: conditionality imposed on a population under military attack, foreclosing the policy space a future government would need to reconstruct the country on social terms.

CADTM extends the doctrine beyond its original legal frame. Since 2008 it has campaigned for cancellation of what it calls “illegitimate, illegal, odious, and unsustainable” debt — four categories that cover debt contracted to benefit privileged minorities against the general interest (illegitimate), debt incurred through procedural violations (illegal), debt meeting Sack’s two criteria (odious), and debt that cannot be repaid without violating social rights (unsustainable). Ukraine’s foreign debt meets all four. The doctrine is not, in CADTM’s hands, a mechanism for seeking a ruling from an international tribunal. It is a political instrument for breaking the ideological taboo that debts must always be repaid. The historical sequence CADTM proposes is citizen audit, political decision by a government backed by popular mobilisation, and unilateral repudiation. The precedents are not court rulings but acts of political will: the 1837 US state repudiations of debts contracted by corrupt governments, Juárez’s repudiation of the debts of the French-imposed regime in Mexico, the Soviet decrees of 1918, Ecuador’s 2008 repudiation following a citizens’ audit that identified 70% of the debt as illegitimate. [34] Cancellation is what creditors grant; repudiation is what debtor states do when creditors refuse.

The demand for repudiation is a class demand, not a legal petition. It identifies a conflict between the interests of the Ukrainian working class — no debt burden, funded social provision, public ownership, policy space for a left government — and the interests of the EU, IMF, and private creditors who hold leverage over Ukraine’s present and future. It takes a side. The same class logic runs through the full programme: taxation of oligarchs at 90% of income, as Sotsialnyi Rukh demands; expropriation of oligarchic assets; state control of strategic sectors; socialisation of banking; maintenance of the energy monopoly in public hands; replacement of the eOselya mortgage scheme with genuine social housing; exclusion of predatory lenders from micro-credit and development of community-based alternatives. Yuliya Yurchenko’s FEPS study puts what is at stake plainly: the reconstruction model on the table — crippling state debt, austerity in public spending, low wages and labour protections, remittance dependency — “could hardly be seen as capable of delivering anything comparable” to post-war European welfare-state reconstruction. [35] What is being designed in donor conferences is not reconstruction. It is permanent dependency.

The same class logic applies. Ukraine has the right to defend its national independence against imperialist invasion. That right generates an obligation of solidarity — not charity, not investment, not leverage — on the part of the international working-class movement and the governments it can pressure: any military support that is provided should be provided unconditionally. The current architecture converts solidarity into debt: arms purchases financed through EU loans Ukraine will repay, financial support attached to 325 reform conditions. Sotsialnyi Rukh argues, correctly, that Ukraine must finance more of its own defence and reconstruction through progressive taxation of oligarchic wealth rather than foreign borrowing. [36] But the demand addressed to the international left is inseparable from that: Western workers’ solidarity with Ukrainian workers means demanding their governments provide support unconditionally — not as a source of geopolitical leverage, not as an opening for corporate reconstruction, and not as a debt that will discipline Ukrainian politics for a generation.

“If Ukraine and its people want to regain their sovereignty,” Toussaint wrote, “they must free themselves from the yoke of the creditors who are acting in their own interests and against those of the Ukrainian people.” [37] Debt cancellation, and if creditors refuse, repudiation, is the precondition. The demands articulated by Ukrainian researchers and social movements — on housing, on microlending, on taxation, on reconstruction — are what cancellation would need to be accompanied by to mean anything for the Ukrainian working class. And the demand that support be provided unconditionally is what distinguishes solidarity from the creditor relationship that currently passes for it.

These demands are connected. The sovereign debt trap and the household debt trap are products of the same withdrawal of the state from social provision, driven by the same policy framework — in Ukraine as in Sri Lanka, in Greece, across the economies the EU and IMF have managed on behalf of Western capital. Solidarity with Ukraine means recognising that the creditors presenting themselves as Ukraine’s friends are the ones who will determine what reconstruction looks like, who owns what, and who pays, for a generation, if the left does not intervene.