MOSCOW, November 3. /TASS/. Ukraine has a Plan B in place should the West stop providing assistance, but remains confident that such aid will continue, a member of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (parliament) said on Friday.
"Naturally, [we have a Plan B], but I would refrain from saying that we must take steps in case we don’t receive assistance because, after all, we are sure that we will have it. Probably, assistance will be rendered under certain conditions in terms of control over the funds we will receive. Probably, the volume of assistance will be different, but it will come without fail. We are working on this," Daniil Getmantsev, head of the Verkhovna Rada Finance Committee, said in an interview with the Rada television channel.
Touching on the work of drafting Ukraine’s 2024 state budget, he admitted that "the situation is rather difficult on the financial front," since Kiev has no guarantees about critical financial support from the West. "The 2024 budget envisions financial aid worth $42 bln, but the guaranteed sum stands at $15 bln, [composed of] assistance from the European Commission and the program with the International Monetary Fund," he said.
"So far, we don’t know the guaranteed sum of aid from the United States for the coming year. We understand that it will be very difficult for us without this support," Getmantsev noted.
Ukrainian officials have long acknowledged that Kiev cannot cover its military spending with its own fiscal resources. Not long ago, the Verkhovna Rada adopted amendments to the 2023 budget and Ukraine’s deficit jumped from an original sum of $38 bln up to $54.75 bln. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in October that Western grants and loans to Kiev had amounted to $33.8 bln since the beginning of the year. The draft budget for 2024 discussed earlier by the Verkhovna Rada provides for a deficit of more than $42 bln. By the second reading of the relevant bill, however, the required amount of foreign financing was reduced by $1.9 bln due to bottlenecks in Washington in the passage of a bill on financial assistance to Kiev during extended political wrangling over the speakership of the US House of Representatives.
Earlier, the House voted to support a Republican-backed bill on additional aid appropriations for Israel that makes no mention of Ukraine. Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican, Louisiana) said that the lower chamber of the US Congress is seeking to link potential future aid to Ukraine with heightened security and control measures at the US southern border, which is experiencing an unprecedented influx of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. The White House warned, however, that President Joe Biden would veto the GOP bill if both houses of Congress adopt it in its present form, i.e. without any provisions for aid to Ukraine.