The European Union should develop an ‘equivalent’ version of the World War II-era US Marshall Plan to fund projects in Moldova and Ukraine, Moldovan President Maia Sandu said.
“Just as Western Europe was offered an economic lifeline after the Second World War by the American Marshall Plan, Moldova and Ukraine need a tightly focused 21st-century equivalent from the European Union,” Ms. Sandu said on Monday at the EU’s annual budget conference in Brussels.
US President Harry Truman signed the the Marshall Plan in 1948. Named after then-Secretary of State George Marshall, it provided billions of dollars in economic assistance to European countries reeling after WWII.
Last year Moldova and Ukraine received the green light to start accession talks with the EU, but both are lagging on economic development, with Ukraine in the full throes of a war with Russia.
“The Marshall Plan was designed to show to an exhausted continent that capitalism and democracy were a better way forward than anything offered by communism. Today’s modern version will also need to offer similar hope to those of us working our way towards EU membership,” the West-leaning Moldovan leader said.
In February, the United Nations estimated that it would cost $486 billion to reconstruct war-ravaged Ukraine over the next decade.
During her speech, Sandu,a former World Bank economist said the bloc’s budget should not only finance critical green, digital, and infrastructure projects, but should also be geared towards “protecting values” that are under threat from “forces with a dark vision” for the European continent.
“Budgets were about the nuts and bolts of economic and social progress, how we should invest in education, technology, the green transition and many other important needs,” Sandu said. “We still need to do all of that – but we also need to invest in saving lives, bringing back peace, and defending liberty at key moments in history.”
“Europe has always stepped up and found the resources to help because we Europeans believe that the expansion of evil can be stopped only through the enlargement of goodness,” she added.
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