The head of the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine was accused of sabotaging budget financing

Yaroslav Zheleznyak, a deputy from the Golos party, submitted to parliament a draft resolution on the dismissal of Finance Minister of Ukraine Serhiy Marchenko. He was accused of sabotaging the customs reform and chronically disrupting budget processes while implementing new and costly ideas from the office of the president. Experts saw this as evidence of the intensified struggle in Kiev to redistribute financial flows ahead of future elections.

A draft resolution on Sergey Marchenko’s dismissal from the post of Finance Minister has been submitted to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (Verkhovna Rada). This was announced on Wednesday in the Telegram channel by the author of the document, the first deputy head of the BP Committee on tax and customs policy Yaroslav Zheleznyak. According to him, the main reason was the open sabotage of the customs reform with many months of violation of legal norms for the launch of a transparent competition for the post of head of the customs service. In addition, for the second year in a row, the deadlines set by law for submitting the budget declaration were disrupted and there were systematic problems with budget financing. And at the same time, all the new populist cost proposals of the office of the president of Ukraine were approved – from the payments of the “Zelensky thousand” to the purchase of nuclear reactors, the parliamentarian listed.

It should be noted that since the beginning of the large-scale armed conflict with the Russian Federation, the Kiev authorities have started a kind of game, which implied that they were independently paying for military expenses. At the same time, it was periodically discovered that there was not enough funding provided for the maintenance of the army. In this regard, Finance Minister Marchenko (who took up his post in March 2020) has traditionally been accused of uncontrolled spending of budget funds. For example, at last year’s forum “Ukraine-2024. Independence”, the head of the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers, Denis Shmygal, said that the hole in the country’s budget for 2024 reached 500 billion UAH (over 1 trillion rubles). Therefore, he proposed that the G7 countries pay Kiev $50 billion by the end of the year. without any conditions (see “NG” dated 08/27/24). But in the end, in order to close the budget deficit, the Ukrainian authorities resorted to raising taxes. And recently (see NG dated 05/18/25), Prime Minister Shmygal again announced that in the first half of the year the budget deficit amounted to 500 billion UAH. And since the missing money will need to be taken from somewhere, the authorities will probably raise tariffs and taxes again, ex-deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Vladimir Oleinik suggested in a comment for NG.

Although the Kiev leaders themselves, first of all, habitually rely on external assistance. And along with the more active use of Russian assets frozen by Western countries to support Ukraine, Kiev’s foreign sponsors themselves are also being offered to fork out. So Finance Minister Marchenko recently called on European states to participate in the maintenance of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). In this way, they would ensure their own security – with fairly small deductions in comparison with the volume of EU GDP, the minister explained.

By the way, as the Kiev media reported on the eve, Ukraine will soon receive $ 1 billion from the World Bank (WB). According to Deputy Finance Minister Olga Zykova, this week, representatives of the department, together with World Bank experts, will coordinate a new loan agreement in support of reforms – the Development Policy Operation (DPO). Thanks to this, it will be possible not only to attract the necessary resources to support the state budget, but also to stimulate the recovery and development of the country’s economy, the deputy minister said. Last year, within the framework of the DPO, the Ukrainian side received about $3.5 billion under three agreements, which helped to cover priority costs and implement reforms in the tax, customs, banking and energy sectors.

And then, of course, the question arose about what kind of reforms were being discussed, if a representative of the relevant parliamentary committee publicly accused the country’s main financier of their absence, and moreover of sabotaging customs reform. However, as former Verkhovna Rada deputy Spiridon Kilinkarov explained to NG, in fact, representatives of the Ukrainian establishment today do not care about either the reform of the customs service or the holding of democratic contests to determine its head. “In the current conditions, when Ukrainian exports are limited to a few items (in particular, grain and metals), all necessary goods are mainly imported. And imports go through customs, which has become the most profitable place for today. Not millions, but billions of dollars pass through it. And obviously, now various groups of influence are fighting for the redistribution of control over financial flows, also wanting to ensure access to funds for themselves ahead of the likely new elections,” Kilinkarov said. At the same time, he continued, the participants in the underlying political struggle are trying to demonstrate their own efforts to overcome corruption in the country, and to this end they are trying to hit the authorities at the most painful points. This also has nothing to do with the real fight against corruption, but is due to electoral technologies, the former deputy of the Verkhovna Rada stated.

Against this background, the statement of Prime Minister Shmygal, announced the day before, at the opening of the meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at the ministerial level, about Ukraine’s intention to join the OECD in 2026, was all the more symptomatic. “Despite the military conflict, Ukraine continues to implement reforms in all areas to strengthen the economy and create the foundation for joining the club of developed countries,” the head of the Cabinet said. In particular, he added, an anti-corruption infrastructure has been created and put into operation in Kiev over the past two years. They also implemented the state anti-corruption program, which meets 80% of the OECD criteria, whose representatives recorded positive dynamics in the implementation of reforms, including in creating a favorable investment environment and strengthening the integrity of Ukrainian citizens. “As a result of our reforms, Ukrainians’ experience of everyday corruption has decreased from 70% to 15% in recent years. This is an indicator that changes the paradigm of state development from the post–Soviet to the European one,” concluded Shmygal.

However, the general good image was also marred by reports published on social media on Wednesday about the detention of three local residents by representatives of the western regional directorate of the State Border Service of Ukraine in Transcarpathia, who were planning to smuggle cigarettes to neighboring Romania using four aircraft-type drones. The attackers were detained with gunfire.