Amber Infrastructure Plans 10-15 Year Exits as 2 Ukraine Funds Hunt ‘Ready-to-Build’ Projects

As Amber Infrastructure’s Managing Director and Ukraine Lead Dominykas Tuckus sat down for our interview, opposite an enormous panoramic window overlooking Kyiv’s city center, a “yellow” air raid warning sounded, meaning that drones were flying somewhere above Kyiv. We were able to continue.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Amber Infrastructure is among those foreign investors that aren’t waiting for the war to end – they’re willing to risk investing in the country while the war is still going on. The London-based company partnered with the country’s largest investment firm, Dragon Capital, to announce Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund I, with a first close of €207 million ($231.8 million) on May 27. Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund I is backed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) up to €60 million ($67.2 million), the European Investment Bank up to €50 million ($56 million) and the International Finance Corporation up to €40 million ($45 million). The fund’s target size is €350 million ($390.4 million), the EBRD wrote. Amber Infrastructure’s Dominykas Tuckus (second from left) and EBRD First Vice President Greg Guyett (third from left) pose with other participants at the signing ceremony for Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund I during the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2025 (URC2025). (Photo provided to Kyiv Post by the EBRD press service) Other Topics of Interest 80% of Ukrainians Back Refinery Strikes Despite Risks of US Aid Cut Only 11% support halting strikes on Russian oil refineries in a scenario involving US aid cuts and no reciprocal commitments from Moscow. The second vehicle, the European Flagship Fund for the Reconstruction of Ukraine, announced about €260 million ($291 million) in commitments on June 25, but this is not its final size. “The EU Flagship Fund size is less defined because it has not yet reached the first close… We have a possibility to attract private capital on top of that [amount],” Tuckus told Kyiv Post. The EIB, German KfW, Italian Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), Polish Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK), and French Proparco signed the first commitments, along with Amber Infrastructure and Dragon Capital, according to the press release. The fund is backed by the European Commission initiative and was announced during the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2025 (URC2025). The British International Investment also announced its commitment of £13 million ($17.4 million) to the fund in its press release. The two funds co-invest in the same assets, with Amber acting as a single manager, Tuckus told Kyiv Post on the sidelines of the Kyiv International Economic Forum (KIEF). That said, Amber still says Ukraine has always been “on the radar,” but its donors “never had this mandate to look at Ukraine,” Tuckus said. “We have a mandate to look at and manage transactions that are located in the EU part of Central and Eastern Europe… everything from Bulgaria, Romania, then Hungary, then Western Balkans also, like Slovenia, Croatia, Czech Republic, etc., all the way to the north”, he said. The investment company is a part of Boyd Watterson Global Asset Management Group LLC. Founded in 2009, Amber Infrastructure has made almost 200 investments in 22 countries so far, according to its website. Assets under management stand at about £14 billion ($16.9-19.3 billion) as of Dec. 31, 2025, the website says. The countries of operation include the UK, the US, New Zealand, and Germany. Amber’s other funds include the Three Seas Initiative Investment Fund (3SIIF), a dedicated commercial fund targeting critical infrastructure investment in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). “We are operating in countries next to Ukraine, and we never had a mandate to invest in Ukraine. And this is when we started looking at Ukraine more seriously. And this is how we met Dragon Capital,” he added. The company was looking for a partner on the ground, and Dragon Capital was the candidate. Led by Tomash Fiala, the fund is the country’s largest B2B real estate owner but lacks enough expertise in energy and infrastructure. Amber decided to bring in its experience in these investments, Tuckus said. “What is useful is that they have worked with real assets,” he explained. Tuckus said Amber aims to invest on the infrastructure side into “real assets” that generate forecastable cash flows – he referred to them as “passive assets that benefit the economy”. Amber wants to use the same strategy as with the 3SIIFs fund in Ukraine, targeting energy, transport, and digital infrastructure. But the focus is on smaller, ready-to-build projects that are fully permitted, have undergone full technical due diligence, and can enter construction early. “I think it would be difficult to rely on regulation only to generate sufficient returns on our investments,” he added. During the panel discussion at KIEF, Tuckus also said the fund sees a lack of “bankable” projects, and potential candidates don’t spend time preparing the documentation and due diligence. Still, Amber targets energy, transport and logistics, digital infrastructure, and critical reconstruction infrastructure, with an exit strategy in 10 to 15 years. “In the fund, like the Infrastructure Fund for Ukraine, there is a very clear starting period, you know, where we have an investment period, and then we have a holding period, and then we have an exit,” Tuckus said. “Whatever we do now, all the investments that we will execute in the next few years, during the investment period, we’ll need to exit to pay back the investors their invested capital plus their returns,” he added. But despite having already raised billions of euros, Amber announced only one transaction when the interview was published. “There are [an additional] two projects identified already a while ago, and we are now just simply in preparatory works on those,” Tuckus said. The first announced investment is the distributed energy project Power One, led by ex-Ukrenergo CEO Volodymyr Kudrytskiy, who claimed that it also hired 50 other colleagues from Ukrenergo in the project, saying this during one of KIEF’s panel discussions. Volodymyr Kudrytskiy, who leads the distributed energy project Power One and is a former CEO of Ukrenergo, speaks during a panel discussion at the Kyiv International Economic Forum (KIEF) in Kyiv. (Photo provided to Kyiv Post by the KIEF press service) Power One (Power 1 LLC) is installing 36.8 megawatts (MW) of gas-piston units and 31.5 MW of energy storage systems in the Zakarpattia region. Power One’s decentralized generation facilities will be located across several sites, each with a capacity of up to 10 MW, the project’s website says. Tuckus did not disclose the size of Amber’s investment in the project. The EBRD provided a €22.3 million ($25 million) loan, against a total project cost of €41.8 million ($46.8 million), according to the project’s profile on the website. Amber’s chair believes the investment projects will be found because Ukraine has “a huge gap” for better electricity, mobile, and internet connections. “The strikes have widened it,” he said. War-risk insurance is a must for the projects, but he feels okay with the current menu of commercial products available in the market to cover war risk. Investing in distributed assets rather than large centralized objects is another risk mitigation strategy for the fund, he said. “Ukraine is a bit more advanced in digital infrastructure, at least in mobile connection. But at the same time, if I ride a train from Poland to Kyiv, there are only a few spots where I can have a proper connection,” Tuckus told Kyiv Post. But Ukraine is a risky market in the full-scale war – Amber could have lived without it. Is the fund okay with the risky environment? “The risk is a relative thing,” Tuckus said. “I come from Lithuania, from a market which was, a long time ago, seen as super risky. Then the risk profile went down substantially. Whoever was involved in any kind of business before this happened made a lot of money. So it’s just a matter of entering the market at the right time,” Tuckus told Kyiv Post. He believes that, at some point, Ukraine will be perceived as less risky as well.