Koretskyi shocked Zelenskyy with the scale of the budget hole, president pressured MPs - media

Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi in mid-August presented to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calculations that showed a gap of tens of billions of dollars between the resources available to Ukraine and the expenditures that the state must finance by the end of the year. After the report, the president began personally demanding that deputies support laws related to EU and IMF financing.

This is reported by "Ukrainska Pravda" citing sources in the government and members of the National Security and Defense Council.

According to the publication, after his appointment in mid-July, Koretskyi began to study in detail the resources available to the state and the volume of expenditures that need to be financed. A UP source in "Servant of the People" claims that the prime minister was quite quickly "quite shocked" by the real state of public finances and did not hide this from deputies.

During August, Koretskyi held meetings in the Office of the President and the Verkhovna Rada, where he showed deputies tables and charts with financial calculations.

Before a major NSDC meeting in mid-August, the prime minister prepared a separate presentation for Zelenskyy. According to UP, the slides showed the gap between the resources available to Ukraine now and the expenditures that must be covered by the end of 2026. It was about tens of billions of dollars.

Sources among NSDC members claim that Zelenskyy was impressed by the scale of the problem. Right from the meeting, he began calling deputies responsible for the passage of bills related to EU and International Monetary Fund programs, and demanded to ensure their support.

Koretskyi himself, according to the publication, expected that showing the real state of public finances would convince parliament to support decisions necessary for international financing. In recent weeks, the prime minister personally called on deputies to vote for European integration and other bills, the implementation of which is a condition for receiving funds from partners.

However, on September 1, the Verkhovna Rada failed a number of such votes. According to UP, because of this, Ukraine is at risk of losing $4-5 billion of relatively quick external financing, and the government does not yet have a clear source to compensate for these funds.

Earlier, Zelenskyy publicly stated that three laws not passed by parliament were related to the possibility of receiving over $4 billion in international aid, and two other failed bills concerned the IMF program.

The problem arose against the background of a significant public finance deficit. Earlier, the government reported the need to find additional tens of billions of dollars, in particular to finance defense needs, and announced a tightening of the budget savings regime.