In the three-day summit’s opening address, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, dressed in his trademark wartime olive-green T-shirt, and projected on monitors from Kyiv, told about 1,000 CEOs and government officials that Ukraine needs $5 billion a month, beginning immediately, in order to stave off full-blown economic collapse—a collapse that would have deep global ramifications. “The amount of work is enormous,” he said. “We have more than a half a trillion dollars in losses, and tens of thousands of facilities destroyed. We need to rebuild entire cities and industries.” Yet rather than describing the dire situation as a crisis, Zelensky cast it as a potentially lucrative opportunity for Western countries and companies.
