UKRAINE secured a $3.9 billion (£3.1bn) loan from the International Monetary Fund today, in return for “reforms,” including a 24 per cent rise in energy prices.

President Petro Poroshenko said the IMF confidence was a sign that the country’s economy was “stabilising,” though it has shrunk by a fifth since the far-right Maidan coup of 2014.

Prime Minister Vladimir Groysman has said citizens should be pleased that gas prices will “only rise by 23.5 per cent” when the IMF had originally demanded they be raised by 60 per cent on the grounds that they had been kept “artificially low since the Soviet era.”