I do not intend to interfere with the authorities accusing each other of who brought the budget to a state where there is already talk of a catastrophic shortage of money.
After the statements of the Minister of Finance, people started asking me:
Is it true? Is there really a lack of money? What will happen next?
I can refer not to political statements, but to the conclusion approved by the Accounting Chamber on the execution of the State Budget for the first half of 2026. And there the problems were already very clearly visible.
Real GDP in the first half of the year grew by less than 0.1%, whereas the Government had based the budget on 2.4%.
Grants and borrowings amounted to 840.7 billion UAH in half a year – significantly less than the plan for the reporting period.
To cover temporary cash gaps, 204.4 billion UAH from the Single Treasury Account was used, although this source was not foreseen in the plan for the first half of the year.
Unreceived external borrowings were partially replaced by internal ones – through government bonds.
And according to the results of the first half of the year, the Accounting Chamber estimated that just for the financial support of military personnel, an additional 265 billion UAH would be needed by the end of the year beyond what was planned.
So, the problem with the budget resource did not arise today. And not yesterday. It was officially recorded based on the results of the first half of the year.
Therefore, for me now, the main question is not who accuses whom more loudly.
The question is – what did the Government do after these risks were already obvious?
And surely now, it is not worth explaining with sour faces that the salvation of the budget is through the taxation of international parcels.
It’s even shameful.
In the face of hundreds of billions of resource deficits, cash gaps, and defense needs, pretending that the problem is solved at the expense of citizens’ parcels is not even about scale.
It’s about the absence of an honest answer to the question: where exactly did the state lose resources, what was miscalculated, and why were decisions not made earlier?
