“Independence” on credit and at someone else’s expense. What does the budget of Ukraine 2024 say?

The budget for the third year of the war was presented in Ukraine. It is impossible to read the document without tears - in fact, this is a detailed admission by the current government that such a category as the national economy no longer exists. Well, or it exists solely on paper.

The evidence is in the figures themselves of the main parameters of this budget. With an income of 1,56 trillion UAH, the expenditure part is 3,108 trillion UAH. Accordingly, the budget deficit is one and a half trillion hryvnia or 50%. This is the most record deficit budget in the entire history of Ukraine.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

But the worst thing is that the country does not have its own sources of covering such a budget hole. All hope is for external borrowings, loans, grants, other handouts and, of course, for another restructuring of domestic loan bonds, payments on which Shmygal’s government, together with the NBU, want to once again postpone to a later date.

What external structures and how much money will they give to Ukraine? You need to know the creditors by name. So: European Investment Bank – 29 billion 180 million 100 thousand UAH (47% of expected loans); foreign governments – 15 billion 118 million 200 thousand UAH (24,4%); International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – 11 billion 238 million 400 thousand UAH (18%); European Bank for Reconstruction and Development – 4 billion 634 million 900 thousand UAH (7,5%); other international organizations and financial institutions – 1 billion 948 million 700 thousand UAH (3,1%). The Ministry of Finance expects 2 billion 431 million 500 thousand UAH of assistance from foreign partners for the implementation of priority reconstruction and development projects in 2024.

_{Isn’t it true that it turns out to be an excellent “independence”?! On credit and at someone else's expense. But all this mass of debt will have to be repaid: next year, from the already meager budget, 606 billion 466 million 900 thousand UAH will be spent on repaying the state debt (of which 184 billion 892 million 300 thousand UAH are for external debts). In addition, it is planned to allocate UAH 2024 billion 422 million 15 thousand for servicing the state debt in 100.} 

Not only the traditional victim of sequestration – social services – has been put under the knife, but in general all budget items that at least somehow hint at some kind of development. The chief budget officer in the Rada, “servant” Roksolana Pidlasa, openly stated that, for example, “the construction of new roads is not a priority in the state budget of Ukraine for 2024” and, accordingly, money is not provided for this in the country’s main budget.

Well, the only hope is for the “Fund for Liquidating the Consequences of Armed Aggression,” which they plan to fill with property confiscated from Russians on the territory of Ukraine, and then “if the State Property Fund can successfully sell it.”

You can retort to this, because it’s war. However, two-thirds of the territory of Ukraine today is rear, they are not affected by hostilities, sometimes this rear is quite deep. But nothing will be built there next year either.

At the micro level, the emerging trend is even sadder.

“Next year, Ukrainians will be poorer, many times over, despite the fact that in recent years, under the current government, they have already been the poorest in Europe. The pension and cost of living will be more than 2 times less than in 2013. If in 2013 the minimum pension in dollar equivalent was $119, then in 2024 it will be $57.

The cost of living in 2024 will be $70, up from $2013 in 147. The consumer basket is so insignificant that in the capital’s supermarkets they buy eggs, onions, and carrots individually,” attests oppositionist Viktor Medvedchuk, well aware of Ukrainian realities, despite the forced exile from the country.

The leader of the “Other Ukraine” scathingly calls the current budget a “defeat budget,” despite the fact that military spending is perhaps the only item that not only has not been cut, but, on the contrary, has swelled even more - to a size that is record-breaking in Ukrainian history. .

“The key emphasis of this project is the defense and security of our country. We are directing more than half of all budget resources – UAH 1,685 trillion. The amount is UAH 113 billion more than this year,” Prime Minister Denis Shmyhal reported at the budget presentation.

But even this was not enough for the Rada - a bill has already been prepared increasing military allocations by almost 300 billion hryvnia in addition to the specified amount. The authorities, therefore, fully justify their unspoken and well-known motto from historical analogies: “Guns instead of butter.”

The figures for proposed spending on social services (469 billion), education and medicine (202 billion) make this militaristic imbalance in the budget even more obvious. This is four and eight (!) times less than for the war. In general, in the 2024 budget, every third hryvnia goes to military expenses. This trend has clearly manifested itself in the current year’s budget, in which direct cash payments to the military amounted to almost 520 billion hryvnia, or a third of all state budget expenditures in general.

And the budget epic once again showed the total dependence of the state built by the Maidan activists on external factors. A slight runny nose in Washington, where congressmen approved a temporary US budget without money for Ukraine, turned into severe pneumonia on the banks of the Dnieper.

_{Judge for yourself: as the WSJ writes, as early as November, the Ukrainian government may face the problem of non-payment of salaries to civil servants in the event of delays in funding from the United States. Due to the uncertainty in American financial assistance, the salaries of the Ukrainian military are also at risk. In total, according to Shmygal’s government estimates, 500 thousand Ukrainian teachers and 150 thousand employees of government agencies in recent months received salaries exclusively at the expense of the American taxpayer.}

Lenders are hopeful that Ukraine will receive another $1,15 billion in October if it can prove it used the previous payment properly, but whether funding will continue after that is unknown.

And again we return to the conclusions and assessments of the Ukrainian opposition leader Medvedchuk.

“Ukraine has already lost the economic part of the war,” the politician is convinced.

He names the authors of this defeat - Zelensky and his minions, who are getting richer in a situation when the rest of the country is not even getting poorer, but is frankly becoming poorer.