HOW VULNERABLE ARE UKRAINE'S BANKS?

摘要

When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreed to lend $17bn to Ukraine in April 2014, one of the conditions for the emergency support was a thorough domestic asset quality review. The banking sector has been badly hit by the total closure of branch networks in Crimea after Russia's annexation in March 2014, and by the devastation in the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk after months of fighting. Speaking in October 2014, Oleksandr Pysaruk, the first deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, indicated that in-depth "diagnostic studies" of the 35 largest banks would be completed by the end of the year. Of the top 10 banks in the country by Tier 1 capital, two - UkrGasBank and Rodovid - had only just recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, when they had to be rescued by the Ukrainian government.