Ukraine has pushed UAH39bn ($865mn) of spending on bomb shelters and grid protection into December, a delay Zelenskiy's former press secretary Iuliia Mendel called a failure of leadership on October 14.
With winter coming and Russian missiles still hitting power plants, the government "ran short of cash and did something remarkable: it put the money for bomb shelters on hold", Mendel, who was President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's spokeswoman in 2019-2021, wrote in a post on X.
The deferral was first disclosed on September 17 by Roksolana Pidlasa, chair of parliament's budget committee, who said the finance ministry had moved capital spending planned for September to November into December. It covers hospital construction and repairs, shelters in schools and hospitals, protection of energy infrastructure and social housing, and Pidlasa warned that many of the projects may not be funded this year at all. Salaries and other social spending continue to be paid.
Delayed foreign money has added to the budget squeeze. The 2026 budget assumes $50.8bn of international financing, of which Ukraine had received about $21bn by mid-September, and an EU tranche was held up because parliament missed an end-August deadline to scrap the duty-free allowance on imported parcels.
The freeze has hit towns and cities as they prepare for what promises to be the war's hardest winter, with Russia back on its campaign to freeze Ukraine into submission since its first large-scale energy attack since spring on October 1. It also sits awkwardly with Zelenskiy's public rebuke of Kyiv city hall for trailing every other region in carrying out its resilience plan.
The Association of Ukrainian Cities appealed to Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi to restore payments to local governments, saying key settlements had been blocked since September 9, Interfax-Ukraine reported on October 5. Communities could not buy fuel for ambulances or for machinery used to clear rubble after shelling, and repairs at medical, educational and social facilities, heating-season preparations and the heated "Points of Invincibility" had all stopped, even though the money was sitting in municipal accounts.
The blockage was achieving what "the aggressor has failed to achieve through shelling since the beginning of the full-scale invasion", the association said, and it asked the prime minister to hold the officials responsible to account.
The Kyiv city administration said on October 9 that the state had unblocked payments for some projects in the capital's energy security plan, including backup heating, cogeneration plants and uninterrupted power for water utilities, Interfax-Ukraine reported. The freeze had slowed critical projects, some of them waiting on equipment ordered from abroad, it said. The plan calls for 1,600 MW of backup heating capacity and 40 MW of backup power for water facilities this year.
Mendel, now a frequent critic of her former boss, was careful to put the blame for the bombing on Moscow. "Every one of those missiles is on Putin," she wrote, but "Telling the truth about Zelenskyy's governance record isn't doing Putin a favor."