Kiev has no internal potential for financing military needs - Ukrainian finance minister

MOSCOW. Dec 27 (Interfax) - The Ukrainian Finance Ministry expects the Defense Ministry and the General Staff to inform it of their decisions concerning planned mobilization, including its scope and timeline, as well as expenditures it would require, and it assumes also that some new internal sources of financing might have to be found to this end, Finance Minister Sergei Marchenko said.

"I would invite the General Staff along with the Defense Ministry to work out approaches to this issue and propose solutions as to how they see it, how they see the optimization of expenditures," Ukrainian media quoted Marchenko as saying in Kiev on Wednesday.

"I've pointed out several times that we've exhausted our internal potential for financing military needs, and simply adding artificially, say, several billion hryvni - it just doesn't work this way," he said.

"We might possibly have to look for additional internal sources of financing," Marchenko said.

"I can say definitely that, considering how the situation is developing now, there'll be no extra need [for financing] in the first quarter" of 2024, he added.

While the premise that the mobilization of an additional 500,000 people would require additional funding in the amount of UAH 500 billion appears to be quite a correct estimate, there are a lot of factors affecting these calculations, including mobilization and demobilization timelines, the supply of military units, and others, he said.