The US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations approved the candidacy of Bridget Brink for the post of US Ambassador to Ukraine, the committee’s Twitter account reported on Wednesday.
“The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee backed Bridget Brink’s candidacy for Ambassador to Ukraine with a powerful message: U.S. support for Ukraine continues to grow,” the committee wrote on Twitter.
Now her candidacy will have to be approved by the full Senate in the coming days.
Earlier on Wednesday, it was reported that the American embassy in Kyiv officially resumed its work. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that “additional measures have been taken to ensure the safety of our colleagues who are returning to Kyiv.”
Bridget Brink has been an employee of the US State Department since 1996, and since 2019 she has been the US Ambassador to Slovakia.
In its new video, the YouTube channel “Club of Experts” analyzed the situation in the Ukrainian economy before the start of the Russian aggression. As you know, the State Statistics Service of Ukraine has temporarily suspended the publication of statistical information for the period of martial law, as well as for three months from the moment it ends. The exception is the publication of data on the consumer price index, separate information on statistical indicators for 2021, as well as for the period January-February 2022.
If we return to the indicators of the beginning of the year, at that time we could talk about economic growth and recovery after the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, says the founder of the Club of Experts, Candidate of Economic Sciences Maxim Urakin.
“Officially, the number of unemployed in the country, according to the State Employment Center, as of January 2022, was just over 358,000 people. In this direction, there was a positive trend and the recovery of jobs after the labor market crisis that was caused by the pandemic,” he explained.
In addition, the expert noted that according to the State Statistics Service, Ukraine’s GDP in 2021 grew by 3.4% after a decline of 3.8% a year earlier. At the same time, there was an increase in industrial production and retail trade within the country.
“Industrial production in Ukraine in 2021 increased by 1.1% after a 5% drop in 2020. At the same time, in 2021, compared to the twentieth, the retail trade turnover increased significantly, by more than ten percent and amounted to more than one trillion four hundred forty-three billion hryvnia,” Urakin added.
All this, according to the founder of the Club of Experts, may indicate that in the pre-war period the country’s economy showed positive indicators of development.
The full video can be viewed on the YouTube channel “Expert Club” at the link:
The situation in Ukraine will be one of the central topics of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, which will be held this year from May 22 to 26, Swiss media reported on Wednesday.
They note that after a two-year break caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the Davos Forum will be held in person.
The event will be attended by about 2 thousand people, including about 50 world leaders.
For the first time in many years, the WEF will be held this year without Russian participation, Swiss media indicate.
They also draw attention to the fact that the list of invitees to the forum does not look as impressive as in previous years. So, neither US President Joe Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris will come to Davos this year. China will also not be widely represented.
Head of the State Archival Service of Ukraine Anatoliy Khromov states that today in Ukraine, a maximum of 5% of archival documents have been digitized.
“In archival terms, we are one of the largest countries in Europe. We have 86 million storage units only, most often these are cases on paper, which, according to the regulations, can contain up to 250 sheets, that is, billions of copies,” Khromov said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.
According to him, the pace of digitization in previous periods, unfortunately, was quite low, but now the agency has achieved that last year the pace of digitization increased by 500%.
“But even this is quite small, because earlier the pace was such that it would take thousands of years to fully digitize. Therefore, I am not ready to say for sure, but as of now, a maximum of 5% of documents have been digitized,” the head of the Archive said.
Khromov said that the agency is trying to attract international partners, because there is no state digitization program and has never existed.
“We planned that together with our partners we could digitize all key documents of interest to people in the future for seven-ten years: metric records, books of civil registration offices, population censuses. It would be quite real. And now, even despite the war, we are signing such agreements because we believe that as soon as it becomes safe in the region, we can continue these digital projects,” he concluded.
As reported, in May, Ukrainian State Archival Service presented an interarchive search portal, which allows access through a single window to digital archive resources. At the moment, the digital resources of three central state archives of Ukraine are presented on the platform, together they are almost 1.5 million full-text scanned copies of archival documents, to which a full-fledged search engine has been created. In particular, we are talking about the Central State Archive of the Supreme Authorities and Administration of Ukraine, the Central State Archive of Public Associations of Ukraine, the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine.
The report of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on the results of 2021 clearly indicates the approach of a climate catastrophe, said UN Secretary General António Guterres.
“The global energy system has been disrupted and this is bringing us closer to a climate catastrophe,” Guterres said on Wednesday, commenting on the document.
“Rising sea levels, rising ocean temperatures, concentrations of greenhouse gases, increasing acidity in the oceans have set new alarming records in 2021,” the UN Secretary General added.
In turn, the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, Petteri Taalas, warned that these processes will continue until there are means to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
The UN Secretary General proposed a number of measures to accelerate the energy transition, recalling the availability of renewable sources such as wind and solar energy. In addition, he recalled the need to expand the supply of components for renewable energy technologies.
Guterres urged states to speed up and simplify the process of approving solar and wind energy projects, modernize electricity grids, end fossil fuel subsidies and triple investment in renewable energy. “The time has come to accelerate the transition to renewable energy before it’s too late,” the UN Secretary General said.
JSC Ukrzaliznytsia notes a number of problems on the part of the transport system of European countries, which prevent increasing the volume of cargo transportation by rail from Ukraine to Europe.
“The set of technical problems is that the transport system of European countries is not technically ready to transport such large volumes. It needs additional rolling stock: wagons and locomotives,” Deputy Director of the Department of Commercial Work at Ukrzaliznytsia Valeriy Tkachev said at the “Economics of War: May Review and Focus on Infrastructure” conference.
According to him, today Ukrzaliznytsia transports cargo using only 2,000 wagons, or about 130,000 tonnes of cargo per day at the western border crossings, which is approximately equal to 3.8 million tonnes of cargo per month. At the same time, Ukrzaliznytsia’s own capacities allow using 3,422 railcars, or 220,000 tonnes per day.
According to the Ukrainian railway operator, the root of the problem is that the railway infrastructure of Ukraine and Europe is significantly different in gauge. And for the exchange of goods between these two infrastructures, there are only two ways: to reload at the border or to change the wagon bogie. At the same time, Ukrzaliznytsia said that there are not enough transshipment terminals.
“Besides, the most acute problem is the number of wagons on 1,435 mm European gauge track. That is, we, for our part, can transport a much larger volume of cargo, but there is a problem either with a lack of transshipment capacity, or a problem of the availability of European wagons,” Tkachev said.
He also said that there is another technical problem, which is that the infrastructure of European countries has a limited capacity, since it was built for the needs of intra-European transport.
“In Europe, the share of railway transportation of the overall structure of the transport system is 15-35%, while we have 65%. Therefore, the European infrastructure was not initially designed for such large volumes of cargo transportation by rail,” he said.
According to Tkachev, the growth rate of railway transportation is also affected by organizational issues of business, which for many years has been building supply chains towards ports and which now needs to reorient towards border railway crossings.
“Now we have already accumulated 34,000 wagons in the network, which are loaded and are waiting to cross the border,” Tkachev said.
In addition, the presence of a number of red tape procedures at the border, in particular, repetitive procedures of phytosanitary and veterinary control, significantly slows down cargo transportation.
At the same time, the growth in railway transportation continues to recover: according to Tkachev, Ukrzaliznytsia transported 416,000 tonnes of agricultural products in March, and 638,000 tonnes in April. The goal of Ukrzaliznytsia is to reach 1-1.5 million tonnes per month of export of grain products.
