Pensions will arrive on time not because the budget managed on its own, but because the state has borrowed again — this time $841 million from the World Bank under Canadian government guarantees. The money will not go directly to pensioners, but to compensate the budget for funds it has already spent on pension payments.
Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi announced the attraction of financing. According to him, the funds are directed to cover state budget expenditures related to pension payments. The agreement on the tranche under Canadian guarantees was fixed by the Ministry of Finance and the World Bank back in September as part of the joint PEACE in Ukraine project.
An important clarification worth noting: the attracted financing is not a separate payment directly to pensioners. Pension amounts are not increasing — the state is simply closing an existing budget gap with new debt, instead of finding these funds in its own revenues.
The total project volume has already reached $54.3 billion. This is the largest investment project in World Bank history and one of the key mechanisms supporting Ukraine's financial stability.
The scale of this figure should be read not as an achievement, but as an indicator of dependence: to simply maintain current social obligations, Ukraine has built a structure with international partners worth tens of billions of dollars, where each new tranche is someone's guarantee — that is, someone's risk and someone's political capital spent on Ukraine.
Why now and why through guarantees
The format with Canadian guarantee is not a cosmetic detail. It allows the World Bank to lend to Ukraine on terms that would be inaccessible without third-party guarantees due to military risks. Effectively, Canada takes on part of the responsibility for Ukraine repaying this money, and this makes financing possible in principle, not just cheaper.
How fragile this structure is is shown by the context surrounding the budget itself: according to Finance Minister Sergii Marchenko, Ukraine found itself on the brink due to lack of funds — and it is precisely in this environment that each new tranche under partner guarantees ceases to be technical news and becomes a question of whether the budget will hold until the next injection of funds.
In parallel, the government submitted a draft state budget for 2027 to the Verkhovna Rada, and the Ministry of Finance and the World Bank are already discussing attracting additional financing for Ukraine by the end of 2026 — that is, this tranche does not close the issue, but merely postpones it to the next round of negotiations.
Reforming the formula instead of increasing payments
Alongside the search for money to cover current expenditures, the government is preparing changes to the pension system itself. It is proposed to update approaches to forming pension payments to make the system fairer and more understandable for citizens. This means that the money from the World Bank is a bridge to reform, not reform itself: it buys time, but does not change the rules by which pensions are calculated.
On the same day, Ukraine received another tranche through a different financing line — 3.3 billion euros from the EU under the Ukraine Support Loan, but these funds are intended for the purchase of missiles and drones. The comparison is telling: the country finances social expenditures through debt under international guarantees, while weapons are received as a separate targeted tranche. Both flows are loans, and both in one way or another burden the future budget.
The question that remains open: will the government manage to complete the reform of the pension formula before the supply of partner guarantees runs out, or will the state continue to cover social obligations with new tranches, each of which only postpones the moment when it will have to find this money within the country.
