Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko is meeting with the country's bondholders on Wednesday / Photo from UNIAN
Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko will meet with the country's bondholders on Wednesday in a down-to-the-wire effort to reach a restructuring deal before a possible default.
With its economy battered by a conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the east, Ukraine is inching closer to a July 24 deadline for $120 million in coupon payments. While both Kyiv and its creditors say they hold out hope for a deal, neither side has budged in months of bitter talks, according to an article by William Mauldin and Laura Mills on The Wall Street Journal's blogs.
Ukrainian officials say that skipping the payment would be a "technical default" and just a minor bump in the road for an already hard-hit economy. But the creditor committee, made up of four members who hold about $9 billion of Ukrainian debt, has suggested that any failure to repay counts as a default and stands to jeopardize Ukraine's recovery plans.
"A technical default is not the end of the country in any way—it's the start of restructuring," Ukraine Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius said in an interview at a Ukraine business conference in Washington.
"It cuts us out of the public markets for a certain period of time, but we knew that from the beginning," he said.
Another Ukrainian official familiar with the negotiations said the country may still avoid a default ahead of the July 24 deadline if the two sides set aside their differences in this week's talks.
"If we're making serious progress, then I think we can make that payment," the official said.