It was deliberately symbolic that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) chose Riga for its 35th annual meeting. Latvia, one of the EBRD's earliest countries of operation and a nation that shares a border with Russia, knows something about what it means to rebuild an economy in the shadow of a larger, hostile neighbour and become a modern part of the European economy.

When the bank's governors gather this week to debate Ukraine's future and their operations in an expanding list of mandates, they are doing so in a capital that has spent thirty years making exactly the journey Kyiv and the rest of the EBRD client states hope to make.

The three-day Annual Meeting and Business Forum, which opened June 5, under the theme "Volatile to versatile — economies innovating in a changing world," assembles shareholders, government officials, financial executives and civil society representatives from across the bank's operating regions.

And development banks have found a new role. During the boom years of the noughties, the original member states of Central and Eastern Europe made enormous progress and their economies began to boom. Since then they have been hit by a series of shocks, starting with the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, but since then growing Russian aggression, the pandemic of 2020 and most recently the outbreak of war in Ukraine. That has changed the game and made development bank financial and technical aid essential once again. And it's a task that won’t stop. There is talk of a ceasefire in Ukraine, but even before it appears, the EBRD and the other International Financial Institutions (IFIs) will play a key and irreplaceable role in funding Ukraine’s reconstruction that will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The agenda is broad — panels on artificial intelligence, the space race, skills and the energy transition all feature. But the session that will define this year's gathering takes place on June 6, when governors will be asked to formally reaffirm the EBRD's support for Ukraine and endorse the bank's continued role at the forefront of international efforts to fund both wartime resilience and eventual reconstruction.

It is, by any measure, an unusual mandate for a multilateral development bank. The EBRD was built to support transition economies in peacetime. It is now being asked to finance the reconstruction of a country that is actively at war.

€10bn and counting

The numbers involved are substantial. Russia was long the largest recipient of EBRD funds that help fuel its economic recovery in the noughties. After the annexation of Crimea that funding stopped completely and Ukraine took over as one of the biggest recipients of funding. The EBRD has deployed close to €10bn in Ukraine's real economy since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022 — financing that has kept businesses operating, supply chains functioning, essential infrastructure from complete collapse and funding for energy and the reconstruction of Ukrainian power stations destroyed by Russian missiles. That figure makes the bank Ukraine's single biggest investor.

At the plenary, governors will be asked not merely to endorse what has already been done but to back a step-up in investment once reconstruction begins in earnest. The EBRD's position — that preparation for reconstruction should start now, in parallel with active conflict — represents a significant evolution in how multilateral institutions think about their role in war economies. The traditional model, in which reconstruction financing begins during the transition period from the old socialist centrally planned economies to a post-conflict scenario.

Ukraine's Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko is due to address the Ukraine panel, alongside UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who sits on the EBRD's board of governors. Reeves has been among the most vocal supporters of sustained financial commitment to Ukraine within European institutional circles, and her presence on the panel signals the seriousness with which London views the bank's reconstruction role.

A record year investment year

The Riga meeting comes off the back of the strongest year in the EBRD's history. The bank invested a record €16.8bn across its regions in 2025, financing 640 projects, with 75% of investments — some €12.7bn — going to the private sector. The total exceeded the €16.6bn deployed in 2024, which had itself been a record. Annual disbursements hit a new high of €11.5bn, up from €10.6bn in 2024, while 56% of total investment — €9.4bn — went to green transition projects.

EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso said: "2025 was a year of continuing challenges, but also many striking achievements. I am proud that the bank delivered unprecedented support to Ukraine, while fuelling private-sector development, enhancing competitiveness and boosting growth across our economies."

The geographic spread of the bank's activity underlines how far its mandate has stretched from its original post-Soviet remit. The southern and eastern Mediterranean region received a record €2.8bn across 65 projects, making it the third-largest regional recipient of EBRD investment. Egypt alone attracted €1.3bn across 26 projects, while Morocco hit an all-time high of €895mn, with over 80% classified as green finance. Turkey received a record €2.7bn, with the bank's response to the devastating 2023 earthquakes remaining a major focus — surpassing its initial pledge with total investment of €1.6bn in earthquake-affected regions over three years.

In Central Asia and Mongolia, the bank deployed nearly $2bn across 120 projects — one of its strongest results in the region for over a decade — with Uzbekistan the largest recipient for the sixth consecutive year, receiving over $1bn.

Africa is the most recent addition to the EBRD’s mandate. Two landmark firsts rounded out the year: a €30mn sovereign loan to Benin's national power distribution company marked the bank's first investment in sub-Saharan Africa, while a $100mn trade finance facility to the National Bank of Iraq represented its first foray into that country.

Financing Ukraine’s war repairs and planning for what comes after

The bank remained Ukraine's largest institutional investor in 2025, deploying a record €2.9bn during the year. The headline figure, however, understates the complexity of what the EBRD is actually doing — which amounts to running a parallel reconstruction operation inside an active war zone.

Energy security was the single largest financing priority, accounting for more than €1.2bn. The scale of the challenge is formidable: since the beginning of the full-scale war, Ukraine has lost more than 10 gigawatts of generation capacity to Russian strikes, with attacks intensifying in the winter of 2025, as president Vladimir Putin tried to freeze Ukraine into submission by targeting power plants and energy infrastructure.

The EBRD's response has been to fund distributed, hard-to-target generation rather than large centralised plants. A €248mn project with Ukrainian Railways financed the supply and installation of up to 200MW of decentralised gas-fired power capacity at rail sites across the country. A separate €22.3mn loan to private energy company Power One funded gas-piston power plants and battery storage systems at multiple sites in western Ukraine.

Beyond energy, the bank has pushed financing into the arteries of daily economic life. In Lviv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Cherkasy, around €100mn in EBRD loans and grants addressed critical needs in public transport, wastewater management, district heating and energy resilience. A €50mn loan to Nova Poshta, Ukraine's leading postal and courier operator, will broaden employment access for underserved groups including people with disabilities. In agribusiness, loans to a mineral water group and a major food retailer were directed at sustaining food security in wartime conditions.

Through partner financial institutions, the bank provided a record €1.2bn in 2025, including €550mn under its Trade Facilitation Programme and €504mn via portfolio risk-sharing programmes — enabling Ukrainian banks to extend new lending of up to €1.6bn. Since 2022, risk-sharing programmes have facilitated more than €2.4bn in new financing across approximately 30,000 sub-loans, primarily to small and medium-sized enterprises.

The most significant structural development of the year, however, was the launch of Ukraine FIRST — the Ukraine Facility for Infrastructure Reconstruction — unveiled at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome in July 2025.

The initiative, co-managed by the EBRD and the European Investment Bank, which has become one of the main EU tools for distributing aid to Ukraine, with initial funding of €30mn from the two institutions and the European Commission, aims to accelerate reconstruction by pooling donor contributions, streamlining project preparation and coordinating the planning of large-scale infrastructure investments.

By the time of the Rome conference, total EBRD financing deployed in wartime Ukraine had reached €7.6bn. The bank has signalled its intention to continue investing between €1.5bn and €2bn a year.

A separate Ukraine Renewable Energy Risk Mitigation Mechanism, also launched at the conference, is expected to support up to 1.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy projects, potentially mobilising €2bn in investment. Russia has destroyed around half of Ukraine’s pre-war total of almost 60GW of generating capacity and left the country as a net importer of power from its EU allies.

Riga's message

The choice of venue is not incidental. Latvia's President Edgars Rinkēvičs met EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso at Riga Castle on June 5, ahead of the formal opening. He welcomed the bank's intention to increase its support for Ukraine and used the meeting to press for deeper EBRD engagement in Latvia's own eastern border regions — the areas closest to Russia and Belarus that have become, since 2022, both a security concern and an economic development priority.

Holding the event in Latvia "reaffirms the region's strategic relevance for the bank," as the EBRD noted in its opening materials — language that carries more weight than the usual diplomatic boilerplate when the region in question shares a frontier with the country that invaded Ukraine. Riga last hosted the annual meeting in 2000, when the question of Russian aggression toward a neighbouring state was not on the agenda of any multilateral gathering. Indeed, in those days, Russia was seen as an opportunity, not a problem.

The meeting's opening session brought together Rinkēvičs, Renaud-Basso, and Valdis Dombrovskis — European Commissioner for Economy and Productivity and chair of the EBRD's Board of Governors for 2025-26 — a combination of Baltic, European and institutional leadership that itself tells a story about how the centre of gravity in European economic policy has shifted eastward since 2022.

A notable guest at this year's meeting is Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, attending in her capacity as the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Advocate for Financial Health. Her address will focus on building financial systems capable of reaching the broadest possible population — a theme that intersects, in Ukraine's case, with the very practical challenge of maintaining financial inclusion and household economic resilience in a country where infrastructure is being systematically destroyed.

A bank in transformation

Beyond Ukraine, the Riga meeting reflects a broader strategic evolution at the EBRD. The bank has expanded its operating geography significantly – its mandate now goes far beyond “European” – adding countries in Africa and the Middle East and North Africa region to a portfolio that once focused almost exclusively on the former Soviet bloc and central Europe. That expansion has brought new relevance but also new complexity — the bank must now balance its traditional eastern European mandate with an increasingly global set of commitments.

Governors will also be asked this week to back the bank's new strategic focus on economic governance — a recognition that the institutional quality of the economies it supports matters as much as the volume of capital deployed. For Ukraine, that focus carries particular weight. The country's pre-war reform record was mixed. It is currently being wracked by a $100mn Energoatom corruption scandal that has implicated nearly everyone in Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy inner circle, including the former head of the presidential administration Andriy Yermak, who had to quit. The reconstruction process will require not just financing but the institutional architecture to deploy it without the leakage that has historically undermined international investment in the country.

The EBRD, to its credit, has understood for some time that reconstruction and governance reform are not sequential but simultaneous. The Riga meeting is the moment it asks its shareholders to formally endorse that understanding — and to back it with capital.

Whether the money follows the ambition is the question that Marchenko, Reeves and Renaud-Basso will need to answer convincingly in the Ukraine session.

The EBRD Annual Meeting and Business Forum takes place in Riga, Latvia, 5–7 June 2026. The EBRD operates in more than 35 countries across three continents. Ukraine has been an EBRD country of operations since 1993.