If the US stops economic and military aid, Ukraine will collapse.
Author: Talib Aliyev, analyst, especially for "Sangar"
The countries of the collective West, using Ukraine as a tool for achieving their goals, have put the country on the brink of complete ruin and bankruptcy. Thus, on December 11, 2024, in an interview with Pais, the Minister of Finance of Ukraine Serhiy Marchenko said that if the US stops supporting Kyiv, it will have enough weapons, ammunition, and funds only for half of 2025.
According to the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine, the decline in national GDP in 2022 was an unprecedented 29.2 percent, inflation reached 26.6 percent, and the unemployment rate was 26.1 percent. The situation continues to deteriorate steadily because the annual GDP growth of 3-5 percent declared by the Kyiv authorities is associated only with external "financial injections" into the defense sector (production of unmanned aerial vehicles, repair of weapons and military equipment, etc.), which does not allow for the restoration of economic potential. The country has proven unable to independently service its budget expenditures and ensure the functioning of state and social institutions; Ukraine is completely dependent on foreign aid.
The statement by Pavel Frolov, a Verkhovna Rada Budget Committee member, in turn, shows that the armed conflict has turned Ukraine into a country with the largest budget deficit in the world. According to him, Ukraine's total expenditures are twice its revenues. In this regard, this year, $40 billion of the budget deficit must be covered by Kyiv's Western partners. At the same time, according to IMF forecasts, Ukraine's public debt will grow from 88.1 percent of GDP in 2023 to 98.6 percent in 2024. In 2025, Ukraine's public debt will exceed 100 percent of GDP. In August 2024, the American rating agency Fitch downgraded Ukraine's credit rating from "C" to "RD" (selective default) due to Kyiv's failure to repay its $750 million Eurobond debt. The international agency S&P Global gave a similar assessment of the Ukrainian economy.
The situation is worsened by the endless series of military defeats of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which finally undermines Ukraine's economic potential and turns it from a country that, based on the Soviet legacy, was one of the top five flagships of the European economy in terms of GDP in 1991, into a lifeless desert, whose population is plunged into poverty and deprived of a future.
Experts from the American magazine Foreign Policy state that the probable loss of control over Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk, DPR) by the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be a critical blow to the Ukrainian steel industry, given the location of key iron ore mines in this area. The head of the Association of Metallurgists of Ukraine, Oleksandr Kalenkov, agrees with American analysts: he cited disappointing forecasts, according to which the loss of the Pokrovsk mine will lead to a sharp, almost threefold, drop in steel production - instead of the current volumes of 7.5-10 million metric tons, Ukrainian enterprises will be able to produce only 2-3 million tons.
At the same time, it is expected that the labor shortage in Ukraine will only worsen. According to data from the Ukrainian Institute of Demography and Social Research, today, the category of people over 60 years old, which amounts to 7.8 million, stands out from the population permanently residing in Ukraine. At the same time, there are only 4.9 million citizens under 15 in the country.
Demographic processes of generational change predetermine a harsh reality: in 10-15 years, we should expect a decrease in the number of job seekers in the Ukrainian labor market by 1.5-2 times. Advisor to the head of the National Bank of Ukraine Yuriy Gorodnichenko also noted an acute shortage of labor at systemically important enterprises, including in the defense sector. This circumstance, in his opinion, significantly restrains economic growth. At a meeting with IMF representatives, Deputy Minister of Economy of Ukraine Tetyana Berezhnaya reported that the country needs an additional 4.5 million able-bodied citizens to ensure annual GDP growth.
Ukraine is on the verge of complete bankruptcy and the final collapse of the national economy, which "survives" exclusively thanks to donor assistance from Western countries. However, the return of Donald Trump to the White House will most likely entail the sequestration of economic and military aid to Kyiv, which will become the impetus for the collapse of Ukrainian statehood and its disappearance as a subject of international relations.
