MOSCOW, June 14. /TASS/. The West supports Ukraine as long as it continues to fight Russia on the battlefield, but as soon as peace is established, the funding will dry up, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolay Azarov (in office in 2010-2014) said.

"The Kiev propagandists are promising the Ukrainians a better future and are hiding the bitter truth. <…> The civilians are told that, after the war, the West will not cut funding and will happily rebuild Ukraine," he said on his page on Facebook (prohibited in Russia due to its ownership by Meta, which has been designated as extremist). However, according to the politician, when hostilities end "the West will give up on Ukraine."

"There will definitely be no Marshall Plan (the US European Recovery Program passed in 1948 to rebuild war-ravaged Europe - TASS)," Azarov said. According to him, Europe allocates money for hostilities only; this is "the secret of Western generosity." If we assume that Kiev sees another power that might establish peace, "then Ukraine won’t get a single kopeck, dime, cent, or euro." "Not for reconstruction, not for anything else. All funding will be cut off. They will forget about Ukraine; they won’t even talk about it," he said.

To prove his point, the former Ukrainian prime minister recalled the recent example of Chernobyl. In 2011, European representatives were invited to the nuclear accident site to donate money for upgrading the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s sarcophagus. According to the politician, however, it turned out that no one wanted to donate money for peaceful initiatives. "Then we managed to collect only a quarter of the necessary sum; we had to take the rest from the Ukrainian budget," Azarov pointed out. "However, when it comes to an armed conflict against Russia and credit-based funding, both Washington and Brussels are ready to shell out as much as it takes," he stressed.

Last year, the G7 countries advocated the creation of a Marshall Plan for Ukraine, but subsequently the issue was virtually forgotten.

The Marshall Plan (the 1948 European Recovery Program) was an American initiative to provide reconstruction aid to Europe after World War II, first proposed by then-US Secretary of State George Marshall.