Ukraine does not need to raise taxes in 2025 - finance minister

MOSCOW. Nov 2 (Interfax) - Ukrainian Finance Minister Sergey Marchenko told the Forbes CEO Summit 2024 on Friday that he sees no need for raising taxes in 2025, according Ukrainian media.

"At this stage, as minister of finance, I believe we have sufficient funds, and there will be no need to raise taxes [next year]. Given that this is a very unpopular decision, I would prefer not to even talk about raising taxes in the near future," Marchenko said.

Raising taxes is a derivative of the spending on the security and defense sector, he said. The UAH 500 billion in supplementary security allotment was made possible by the additional decisions affecting the balance and the budget he said.

"This has an impact on the 2025 budget as well," he said, adding that it is quite difficult to predict how much the crisis will affect taxes and budget revenue.

The Finance Ministry believes that Ukraine is providing significant resources for security and defense, but should additional needs arise, Marchenko said he would not be able to explain why the ministry cannot come up with a solution.

"This has been the case this year, same as it was in 2023 and in 2022. We just tend to forget that in 2023, we changed the budget three times, increasing the security and defense spending, and in 2022, I think [we did it] six or eight times, because we could not predict the amount we would need for the security and defense sector," Marchenko said.