A man passes the entrance of the National Bank of Ukraine in Kyiv on Dec. 2, 2020. When the central bank lowered its prime rate to a historic low of 6% this summer, it marked the end of the “era of high interest rates,” according to the first deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine Kateryna Rozhkova.
A severe economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic could have brought Ukraine’s banking system to its knees.
But that didn’t happen. It remained stable, proving that the country’s five-year cleanup of the banking sector, which eliminated nearly two-thirds of Ukraine’s banks for illicit schemes, was not in vain.