On 23 September, the FEU, together with Ukrainian enterprises, held an important meeting with strategic partners: the Director General of the pan-European machine tool manufacturers' association CECIMO, Mr. Filip Geerts; the Executive Director of the German Machine Tool Builders' Association VDW, Dr. Markus Heering; the General Manager of the Italian Machine Tool Manufacturers' Association UCIMU, Mr. Davide Della Bella; and their teams.
CECIMO unites the machine tool and industrial technology associations of 15 of the most industrially developed European countries. It is a powerful player in Europe’s economic and political environment, whose support and partnership are now crucial for the modernization of Ukrainian industry.
The main topic of the meeting was the consolidation of efforts to create special programmes and financial support instruments by European countries for supplying European equipment to Ukraine.
The Government of Ukraine has taken an important first step by launching a grant programme for war-affected Ukrainian enterprises to purchase machine tools. The Federation collected enterprises’ requests for such equipment and has already shared them with European associations for processing the supply-related issues. We hope that the first batches of European equipment will arrive in Ukraine soon under this programme.
To make European equipment more affordable for Ukrainian businesses, we also communicated with the export credit agencies of Germany and Italy, which offered practical instruments to support such supplies.
But these are only the first steps. The Ministry of Economy of Ukraine is now actively discussing financial support programmes for the “Industrial Ramstein” with European governments. The procurement of European equipment should become an important part of the reconstruction programmes for Ukraine that already exist or are being created by foreign governments.
During our meeting, European colleagues noted that, based on the requests previously provided by the FEU regarding the equipment needed by Ukrainian enterprises, they had prepared their proposals for supplying such equipment to Ukraine and are now awaiting the launch of support programmes from their governments following appropriate communication from the Ukrainian Government.
We thank our reliable long-term partners, the ILO, for supporting the “Industrial Ramstein” initiative within the framework of the Belgian Government’s project “ILO Support to Ukraine: Preventing Labour Exploitation and Human Trafficking, Supporting Entrepreneurship Development, and Institutional Support for Social Partners”.
