[…] Certainly, the war has already exacted significant human and economic costs. Ukraine’s infrastructure has been decimated. A little over a month ago, in late April, Zelensky claimed that 1,500 educational facilities had been destroyed or damaged, as well as 350 medical outfits, 1,500 miles of road, and 300 bridges. The Ukrainian president added that around 32 million square meters of housing had been compromised by the war. Current projections from the World Bank suggest that the Ukrainian economy will contract by nearly half this year.[…]
“All of us see images of total destruction in Ukraine. You look at big cities like Kharkiv, Mariupol, and barely any building is not damaged,” Gorodnichenko told NPR. On estimating the cost of repairing the destruction, Gorodnichenko said, “One way to look at this is to do an inventory of damaged bridges, buildings, and so on, and calculate the cost of replacement. That would be easily somewhere between $100 and $200 billion.”
The total could get much higher than $200 billion, however, which is already a pretty penny—$15 billion more than the U.S. Department of Education’s projected budget for 2023. A study from the Kyiv School of Economics estimated that Ukraine’s infrastructure suffers about $4.5 billion of war-related damage every week. The researchers estimate that losses could total about $600 billion. […]
About 40 percent of U.S. aid thus far has been devoted to bolstering Ukraine’s capacity to wage conventional war against the Russians. It seems the U.S. approach to Ukraine is to use American taxpayer dollars to fund Ukraine’ destruction, before forking over billions more for its reconstruction. Läs artikel