The loan is a part of a 450 million package to finance the upgrade of sections of the M-05 Kyiv-Odessa road in the Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv and Odessa regions.

PrivatBank reported a net profit of 21.2 billion hryvnias ($806 million) in January-September this year.

Putin’s news conference coincided with heightened tensions over what Ukrainian officials say is a deployment of more than 120,000 servicemen on its borders more than seven years after Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula and Kremlin proxies seized large chunks of territory in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The volume of the e-commerce market in Ukraine in 2020 grew by 41 percent compared to 2019 and reached $4 billion, which is 8.8 percent of the total retail trade.

The country's gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 2.7 percent year-on-year in July-September and by 1.5 percent compared to the previous quarter.