The simplest way to understand what happened to the NBU's reserves in August is to imagine a family budget where the salary suddenly becomes lower than usual, but utility payments and loan payments don't go anywhere. Reserves fell by 5%, to $48.7 billion, and the reason is not market panic, but arithmetic: expenses for maintaining the exchange rate remained almost the same as in July, while external aid decreased.
Where the money went
The NBU sold $4.85 billion on the interbank market and bought back only $500,000 — in other words, it essentially financed the difference between currency supply and demand almost entirely from its own pocket. This is the price of relative exchange rate stability: every month the regulator compensates the market for the currency shortage caused by imports, military business expenses, and domestic demand from the population.
To this were added scheduled payments: $721.8 million for servicing foreign currency state debt, and another $285.2 million in IMF payments. This is not force majeure, but a regular schedule — Ukraine regularly repays its debts even amid war, and these amounts always come from reserves.
And what about aid
Inflows from partners in August turned out to be more modest: $927.3 million to government accounts, with the lion's share — $894 million — coming through the World Bank. For comparison, in June reserves grew immediately by 12% thanks to a record aid tranche. August showed the opposite side of this dependency: when external financing slows down even for a month, reserves immediately feel the impact, despite the fact that the NBU's intervention expenses remained unchanged.
A separate matter is $1.63 billion from converting part of the EU defense tranche under the Ukraine Support Loan program. These funds arrived earlier but were not counted in reserves due to their designated purpose; when the government sold them to the National Bank for hryvnias, they "materialized" in the total sum. This is a technical, not a new cash flow — it's important not to confuse it with additional aid.
What four months of imports means
The NBU traditionally cites this indicator as a benchmark for reserve adequacy. Four months is not a critical, but neither a comfortable level: the international benchmark is usually three months as a minimum safe threshold, so there is still a margin, but narrower than would be desirable in a situation where defense and import expenses remain high, and the debt payment schedule is fixed.
The main question for September and October is simple: will the volume of external aid return to a level capable of covering the NBU's interventions without eroding reserves, or will the regulator have to either reduce currency sales — thereby allowing greater exchange rate flexibility — or continue to deplete its "cushion" while waiting for new tranches.
