The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Aon are expanding the Ukraine Recovery and Reconstruction Guarantee Facility (URGF) from €110 million to €150 million after the original guarantee was fully deployed in approximately nine months. The additional €40 million is backed by the European Union under its Ukraine Investment Framework.
The expanded facility will extend coverage to gas-related assets in transit and storage and to inventory held in warehouses, building on existing lines in inland cargo, motor vehicle damage and railway rolling stock. Two Ukrainian insurers - USG, part of Vienna Insurance Group, and UNIVERSALNA, part of Fairfax Financial Group, Canada - will join existing participants INGO, Colonnade and UNIQA in offering policies through the scheme.
The facility is managed by Aon, which structured the guarantee arrangement between the EBRD and MS Amlin. The EBRD has described the URGF as an open platform, designed to transact with different insurers and reinsurers as the market develops, a structure that places the broker at the centre of any future capacity expansion.
The URGF became operational in March 2025, with MS Amlin as the only international reinsurer on the panel. Within roughly nine months, the facility reached full utilisation, the EBRD told Global Trade Review. Local insurers were still reporting limited capacity to offload war-related risks to reinsurers, a constraint that weighed on their balance sheets. That pressure is the direct driver of this expansion.
As part of the expansion, MS Amlin renewed its €80 million participation and raised its total support to €130 million, making the capacity increase the central commercial development alongside the facility’s widened scope. Premiums generated under the facility have exceeded claims to date, and MS Amlin has not called on the EBRD guarantee, an indication that Ukraine’s war-risk market can operate commercially. Short-term policy structures are part of why the facility can achieve that scale. As policies expire, the underlying capacity recycles, allowing the guarantee to support a multiple of its face value in cumulative written exposure.
“Ukrainian businesses continue to trade and invest despite the conflict, driving strong demand for war-risk insurance,” said Martin Burke, MS Amlin’s chief underwriting officer. “Expanding the facility will allow local insurers to meet more of that demand and provide cover across a broader range of commercial risks. This expansion is an important step towards building a broader, more sustainable market. Bringing in more reinsurers and additional capacity will be vital to supporting Ukraine’s economic resilience and longer-term recovery.”
The EBRD’s guarantee has functioned as the mechanism that brought private reinsurance capacity back into a market where it had effectively ceased to exist. When Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, international reinsurers largely withdrew from Ukraine, stripping local insurers of the capacity they needed to offer meaningful loss limits and aggregates to their clients. By shielding MS Amlin’s exposure through an EBRD guarantee, the structure allows a Lloyd’s reinsurer to write Ukrainian war risk without carrying it fully on its own balance sheet.
Ukraine’s war-risk insurance market is now moving beyond the experimental phase, with state-backed mechanisms, international guarantee facilities and private reinsurance capacity converging into a more structured ecosystem, according to a February 2026 report by Dentons. The URGF sits at the centre of that convergence, and its rapid utilisation has already attracted comparable initiatives.
Separately, Aon structured a US$25 million reinsurance facility for Kniazha Vienna Insurance Group (Kniazha VIG) with the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), announced in February 2026, providing war-risk cover on a portfolio of policies with aggregate limits of up to US$100 million.
The expansion arrives as Ukraine contends with intensifying Russian attacks on energy, transport and logistics infrastructure and the renewed blockade of Black Sea ports, conditions that have pushed businesses to seek cover precisely as capacity has struggled to keep pace with demand. Each new facility that closes, and each renewal that increases limits, adds a data point that other reinsurers will weigh when assessing whether Ukraine is a market they can re-enter.
“With the war continuing to imperil the Ukrainian economy, war-risk insurance is central to sustaining investment and building resilience in Ukraine,” said Greg Case, president and CEO of Aon.
Energy infrastructure and logistics assets have been among the most heavily targeted by Russian strikes. Insuring them has been considered too complex and data-light for most underwriters to price sustainably. The EBRD had previously indicated that demand to extend the scheme into energy-related assets was very strong, but that doing so would require greater scale and more underwriting data before capacity could be deployed responsibly. The inclusion of gas-related assets in transit and storage indicates that threshold has now been reached, at least for this asset class.
EBRD president Odile Renaud-Basso said the URGF “is a critical tool that helps businesses in Ukraine to manage their risk and continue operating in a war environment.”
The initial €110 million guarantee was backed by donor coverage from France, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, and the TaiwanBusiness–EBRD Technical Cooperation Fund. EU funding now supports the expanded tranche, reflecting a broadening of the international coalition behind the scheme.
