MOSCOW, April 15. /TASS/. The current year will be critical for Ukraine in the financial sphere due to a technical budget default and institutional factors, Nikolay Gaponenko, PhD in Economics and associate professor at the Department of Economic Security of the Institute of Law and National Security at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, told TASS.

"It is evident that 2026 can be characterized as a critical year for Ukraine," he said.

According to Gaponenko, there are two reasons for this. "The first is a technical budget default. A $52 bln gap this year amounts to a quarter of the country’s pre-war GDP. Head of the parliamentary tax committee [Daniil] Getmantsev has already explicitly warned parliament that without external inflows, funds allocated for September are being spent as early as April-May," the expert noted.

In this regard, he stressed that if the International Monetary Fund program is frozen due to Ukraine’s failure to meet its conditions, a domino effect will follow, as the Kiev authorities "have already missed three ‘benchmarks’ in the first quarter." "The European Ukraine Facility program and G7 funds are tied to the IMF memorandum as a ‘seal of quality.’ If the IMF program collapses, all financing totaling over $115 bln will fall through," Gaponenko specified.

The second reason, in his view, is institutional. "The Fund insists that even if the active phase of the conflict ends, the economy will not breathe freely, because resources will have to be allocated to infrastructure reconstruction and social payments to demobilized personnel, while businesses will not recover instantly," he explained. "Therefore, it will be physically impossible to ‘get off the credit needle’ in the foreseeable future," he added.

"Once again, the debt burden will fall on the shoulders of the ordinary Ukrainian citizen," Gaponenko concluded.

Kiev and the International Monetary Fund have been negotiating since 2025 on a new four-year program for Ukraine worth $8.1 bln. One of the Fund’s conditions, as it has long insisted that Ukraine find new sources to independently replenish its budget, was the adoption of tax changes. In January, the Verkhovna Rada failed to approve any of the required bills. Despite this, on February 27, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Executive Board approved the new program for Kiev, but the preliminary conditions were converted into mandatory "structural benchmarks." Ukraine is now required to adopt a package of tax changes insisted upon by the IMF.