Director of economic and social programs at the Razumkov Centre Vasyl Yurchyshyn believes that in the near future the arrival of the IMF mission to Ukraine should not be expected.

The IMF is most likely to stop funding Ukraine for the four-year EFF cooperation program in spring 2018, as international financial institutions generally cease funding 8—9 months before the elections in the country to which they provide support. Vasyl Yurchyshyn gave a comment to the UNN media.

According to the expert, the financing of Ukraine by international financial institutions is very much dependent on the extent to which these institutions recognize the success of the reform in Ukraine.

“Ukraine has developed a series of steps that indicate that reforms can be initiated and continued. This refers to the reform of the health care system, pension reform, discussions about the land market, although it is clear that land market reform will be postponed, and of course budget. When the IMF arrives at any country in autumn, one of the central issues is the budget. The nature of the budget debate is not clear. In my opinion, one of the reasons of the IMF arrival delay — the IMF wants to thoroughly analyzes the budget, properly look at how the budget parameters, including the budget deficit correlates with those changes envisaged by the pension reform”, — he said.

According to Yurchyshyn, implementation of anti-corruption measures is very important. He clarified that while the IMF often differentiate political issues from the economic ones, but anti-corruption issue will be properly investigated.

In this regard, I don’t think that the IMF will come to Ukraine in the near future. The next point is that the finance minister has expressed the idea to complete the financial cooperation in 2018. Although it is clear that we will not choose all the planned funds by the end of 2018. We have never chosen them, so there is nothing new there”, — said the specialist.

Yurchyshyn suggested that perhaps February 2018 will be the last period of allocating to Ukraine the next tranche.

It should be recalled, that the IMF Board of Directors approved the allocation of 17,5 billion USD to Ukraine for the four-year program under Extended Fund Facility mechanism on March 11, 2015. The EFF program replaced the Stand-By fund program, which was provided to Ukraine on April 30, 2014.