World Bank’s Favoritism for Ukraine Over Africa Highlights Prioritization of War Over Development
© AP Photo / Andrew Harnik
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has calculated that the World Bank’s preferential loans to Ukraine over the past three years have amounted to “tens of times” more than the institution lent out to all of Africa combined over the same period. Sputnik asked experts what this means.
It’s no secret that the World Bank “is largely under the control of the US and the West,” and “is influenced by neoliberal ideology,” retired Jawaharlal Nehru University professor and Russia expert Dr. Anuradha Chenoy told Sputnik, commenting on Lavrov's remarks.
While the institution’s favoritism for Ukraine is “not surprising,” its prioritization over Africa is “disappointing, because it shows their bias and that their priorities are more for war than development.”
“The countries of the Global South, especially the emerging powers like India, Brazil and South Africa, have been asking for a restructuring of the World Bank and a change in voting rights which are [currently] only in favor of the West. But this never happened,” the veteran academic lamented.
Investigators and whistleblowers have spent years panning the World Bank as a broken institution, thanks to:
1.
a voting system heavily slanted in favor of large Western economies, with the US alone able to veto major decisions requiring an 85% supermajority thanks to its 17.7% vote share. Furthermore, the Bank’s HQ is situated in Washington, and its leadership is handpicked by the US president2.
neoliberal, IMF-style ‘one-size-fits-all’ loans-for-reforms conditions, including privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation and trade liberalization to the benefit of vulture ‘investors’3.
development projects that displace communities, cause major environmental damage, and lead to massive fraud and corruption (from a comically wasteful $30M Armenian water supply project to an $80M Kenya education project stripped to the bone by corrupt actors)4.
failure to achieve its own development goals5.
a dire lack of oversight, and disregard for whistleblowers’ corruption warnings'Swamp of Deluded Self-Interests'
Lavrov’s comments on the disparity between loans for Ukraine and Africa are not shocking due to the institution’s inextricable links to Western interests, including the G7 and its Ukraine ‘coalition of the willing’ compradors, says veteran financial analyst Paul Goncharoff.
“As of August 2025, the World Bank and its partners had mobilized over $81 billion in financial support for Ukraine,” Goncharoff told Sputnik.
“There is not much that can be pragmatically said about the World Bank’s priorities in this swamp of deluded self-interests. I imagine the basis is to maintain the fiction that by throwing money at this tragic affair [Ukraine, ed.], somehow it will win the day. Needless to say, those areas, regions, and projects that could have made positive use of such funds simply are dropped from view and made invisible,” the observer explained.
Arguing that the nations financing and controlling the World Bank could be better characterized as “Hegemony & Associates,” Goncharoff stressed that while Ukraine since 2014 has been turned into a “sinkhole where seemingly unlimited funds can be poured in with little to no true accountability,” the “debt ledger” that Ukraine’s sponsors are accruing “is very real” and will one day come home to roost.
“The list of sovereign debtor nations keeps growing like mushrooms on steroids. [They’ll all] eventually have to repay their emotionally driven largesse. It’s truly a probable end to the financial system we have known as this conflict continues. What comes next is anyone’s guess at this point,” the analyst summed up.
