The needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to counter the armed aggression of the Russian Federation amount to several trillion hryvnias. No single NATO country would be able to confront Russia on its own.
This was stated by Roman Kostenko, Secretary of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, Colonel of the Security Service of Ukraine, in the program of Ihor Dolhov on the Ukrinform YouTube channel.
“As Churchill said, war requires three things: money, money, and more money. The basis of everything is the economy. We need to pay taxes, collect them, and fight corruption so that all the money goes to important things. This year’s total budget of Ukraine is almost UAH 4 trillion, of which UAH 2.2 trillion is the budget of the Security and Defense Forces. That is, we spend half of all funds on defense, and in fact, the entire amount we raise domestically is only UAH 2 trillion. The rest is assistance from our partners, and this should be clearly understood,” Kostenko said.
He emphasized that the needs of the Armed Forces are much greater than UAH 1.5 trillion in defense industry and UAH 500 billion in the procurement budget of the Ministry of Defense – “it’s trillions, trillions and trillions again.”
According to him, the question now is how to provide more funds for defense to be able to adequately respond to challenges.
“The war is now very expensive, and no single NATO country could confront Russia on its own, as it still has large stocks of weapons and equipment left over from the Soviet era,” the parliamentarian emphasized.
He emphasized that the state is already actively developing its own arms production sector, but this process needs to be further deepened for effective functioning.
As Ukrinform reported earlier, the relevant parliamentary committee, the Ministry of Defense, the Security Service of Ukraine and representatives of the interagency commission for military-technical cooperation are working on the criteria for exporting Ukrainian defense goods to partner countries.
Source: Kostenko: Trillions of hryvnias required to repel aggression
