The Ukrainian government has spent 35% of the state’s $2.4 billion COVID-19 fund, with just under 15% of the total fund going to road repairs, Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko said in a Sept. 19 interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Although Ukraine is now regularly recording over 3,000 new cases of COVID-19 and around 40 deaths from the disease every day, Marchenko said he does not see any issue with using the fund for roads.
“I do not consider this a big problem,” he said. “It’s another step to support the economy and economic dynamics.”
Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, decided to use the money that way, Marchenko said. To him, it is a “normal” decision, and his ministry is trying to convince the COVID-19 fund’s representatives that it is acceptable to spend the money on non-coronavirus needs.
Of the $850 million from the fund that have already been used, almost half was spent on repairing bad roads, a key priority set by President Volodymyr Zelensky as part of an ambitious government infrastructure project called “Big Construction.”
Marchenko believes the main reason why the government decided to reallocate part of the fund was the money’s “ineffective usage by some ministries” directly responsible for fighting COVID-19.
It would be worse if only half of the funds were used by the end of the year, because “in December no one would build roads,” according to Marchenko.
“Now we can say that we had the opportunity to use the fund’s money more efficiently,” he said.
In total, roughly 53% of the COVID-19 fund has been allocated for road repairs.
Efficient spending?
As of Sept. 1, the government has spent $390 million on measures for preventing the spread of COVID-19, $96 million on extra payments to medical workers and $350 million on social protection programs, according to the Ministry of Finance.
However, the government spent nine times more on roads than on hospitals during the pandemic, according to Oleksandr Gumeniuk, an investigative expert at the StateWatch non-governmental organization.
He believes the COVID-19 fund was initially created not to fight the disease, but rather to allocate money for road construction.
“It’s a part of this huge ‘Big Construction’ program,” Gumeniuk said during an interview with Ukrainian Radio on Sept. 1. “I have serious doubts that, in the very beginning when the fund was created, the Cabinet of Ministers did not know that they would give most of the fund’s money for the construction of roads.”
Bohdan Malinyak, head of analytical group Accent, says the fund also hit local budgets hard, sucking up around $385 million planned for development in the regions and local communities.
“By its decrees, the good government instructed to set various allowances for employees, and local governments did not receive any resources for such decisions,” he said.
