Beyond financing: what Ukraine gains from cooperation with the IMF (analysis of IMF programs over the last 12 years)

In November 2025, the Ukrainian government and the IMF reached a staff-level agreement on a new four-year program under the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) with potential access to financing of $8.1 billion.

At the same time, cooperation with the IMF has recently sparked heated debate among politicians and experts. This is primarily because the amount of financial assistance Ukraine receives from the Fund is commensurate with the amount of funds that Ukraine must repay to the IMF under previously concluded agreements. In addition, Ukraine will also have to pay interest on loans under the new program once it has been approved.

It should also be noted that the IMF Executive Board will only be able to decide on the launch of the new program once all prior actions have been completed. Some of the proposed measures are being harshly criticized by Ukrainian experts, businesses, and representatives of the non-governmental sector. In particular, this concerns the introduction of mandatory VAT payments for sole proprietors whose annual income exceeds UAH 1 million.

On the other hand, cooperation with the IMF is an indicator that significantly influences and sometimes determines the possibility of obtaining financing from other international development partners. It should also not be forgotten that it is thanks to cooperation with the IMF, in particular the Fund’s pressure on certain issues, that the Ukrainian government has implemented a number of important reforms that today play an important role in state policy.

In order to determine which reforms and changes were implemented thanks to the IMF programs, in this document we reviewed cooperation with the Fund in retrospect and identified its key results.

In total, the sample included six programs concluded between Ukraine and the IMF from 2014 to 2025. The analysts used structural benchmarks, which serve as markers for assessing program implementation, as a basis for their analysis, and it is during their implementation by Ukraine that problems usually arise.