While the EU studies new road and rail aid to Ukraine’s Azov, two international financial institutions are loaning €25 million to Mariupol, the region’s largest city, for new buses, trams and trolleybuses

While the EU studies new road and rail aid to Ukraine’s Azov, two international financial institutions are loaning €25 million to Mariupol, the region’s largest city, for new buses, trams and trolleybuses. Located 30 km west of the front lines, Mariupol’s population has grown to 450,000, swollen by people leaving the separatist controlled section of Donetsk region. On Wednesday, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation signed a €12.5 million low interest loan for Mariupol to buy 64 large buses and to rebuild the Soviet-era bus depot. Similarly, last summer, the EBRD approved a €13 million loan to Mariupol to buy new trams and trolleybuses. Largely powered by overhead electric lines, city’s modern mass transit fleet also is designed to cut carbon monoxide. Largely because of Metinvest’s Iron & Steel Works on the city’s eastern edge, Mariupol has the worst air pollution of Ukraine’s 39 largest cities, according to a study last year by Kyiv’s Central Geophysical Observatory.