A mission of the International Monetary Fund plans to visit Kyiv from March 27 through April 10, Deputy Spokesman of IMF External Relations Department William Murray has said.
"The point of this mission is to continue negotiations with the Ukrainian authorities on a new Stand-By agreement," he said at a weekly briefing in Washington on Thursday.
Murray said that he had no other details and that the possible amount of the loan would be discussed later.
As reported, the IMF mission visited Kyiv January 29 through February 12 to discuss economic policies that could be supported by the IMF with the SBA. Ukraine's First Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov said on January 14 that Kyiv intended to open a new program of financial cooperation with the IMF worth SDR 10 billion.
The previous Ukraine-IMF SBA, also worth SDR 10 billion, was formally terminated in December 2012. It was opened late in July 2010, but the country succeeded in getting two tranches worth a total of SDR 2.25 billion ($3.4 billion). The program was frozen at the stage of the second review in the spring of 2011.
For a year and a half, Ukraine had been unsuccessfully trying to persuade the IMF to drop its objections to the government's subsidizing natural gas tariffs for households until the completion of its gas talks with Russia, but failed.
