Every day, Russia destroys Ukrainians' homes, businesses, and infrastructure. Direct losses of Ukraine alone compounded to hundreds of billions of dollars.
Western leaders have been repeating for months that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is not ready for peace and wants a military victory over Ukraine.
For more than a year now, Ukrainians have been destroying the efforts of an aggressive neighbor, and Western partners are helping - financially and militarily. In particular, on March 8, the EU promised 1 billion euros for artillery shells, and the White House wants to invest more than $6 billion from the next US state budget.
The life of its people is the biggest price that Ukraine pays daily. You cannot measure this in hryvnias or US dollars. But there is also a calculatable material cost — thousands of destroyed houses, mutilated infrastructure, and businesses.
What direct damage has Ukraine already suffered, and how much the war against Russia costs financially? Here is the analysis made by liga.net.
Source: Liga
Housing
The most current estimates of losses from the destroyed homes of Ukrainians are dated to the end of 2022. The Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) project "Russia will pay" estimates the damage to Ukraine's housing stock at $54 billion.
Prime Minister of Ukraine, Denys Shmyhal, gave the same assessment. According to him, housing restoration is the government's second priority after energy.
"150,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed. Their restoration will be a prerequisite for the return of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from abroad," he said.
The state plans to compensate Ukrainians for housing destroyed during the war. The parliament recently adopted the relevant bill. To receive compensation, you need to submit an application. As of February 1, there are already more than 320,000 appliers.
Infrastructure
According to the KSE calculations, infrastructure is in second place regarding the amount of damage caused. The amount of losses is $35.6 billion.
Russia also caused significant losses to educational institutions. The total damage from the destruction is estimated at $8.6 billion.
Energy comes next with losses of $6.8 billion, but this information may be incomplete, note the authors of the "Russia Will Pay" project. These figures are based on open sources, and the government usually does not provide much concrete information about the destruction of the energy infrastructure.
The list of losses includes agriculture, health care, transport, etc. In third place are business losses. More about it is below.
Business losses
The KSE study deals specifically with direct business losses, estimated at $13 billion in 2022. At least 109 large and medium-sized enterprises suffered direct losses from the Russian aggression.
"The majority of destroyed and damaged enterprises are concentrated in six oblasts — Kyiv and Donetsk (each 17% of the total), Zaporizhia (14%), Kharkiv (13%), Luhansk (10%) and Mykolaiv (8%)," it says in the study.
The largest assets included in the list of losses are large industrial plants, first of all the Mariupol giants.
So, in general, the damage to Ukraine's infrastructure (including business losses) amounts to $137.8 billion.
Military expenses
If in the pre-war year 2021, state budget expenditures on defense and security (the latter includes public order and the judiciary) amounted to UAH 301.87 billion, then in 2022 this indicator increased fivefold to UAH 1.59 trillion.
If converted into US dollars, it will be $11.06 billion against $46.8 billion.
In the first two months of 2022, there was $1.26 billion, but let's leave them in war expenses, because preparations for the invasion were taking place.
There are no data yet for the first two months of 2023, but you can take the average monthly expenses last year. $9.2 billion will come out.
So, in total, about $56 billion was spent on security and defense. A significant part of the state budget expenditures in this area is the payment of salaries to the military. We analyzed how much money is going into this.
Payments to military personnel in the rear were reduced to save billions. Why it is important for the budget
And a big nuance is that these are only expenses from the Ukrainian budget, while a large amount of equipment, weapons, various equipment, equipment for soldiers is supplied to us by Western partners.
International aid
Taking into account the huge costs of the Ukrainian defense sector during the war, there is practically no money left for any other items of expenditure. Therefore, Western countries not only supply weapons and equipment but also help to cover the enormous budget deficit.
So, in 2022, Ukraine received more than $32 billion in financial aid from its partners, that is, money that went to budget expenditures, such as health care, social welfare, education, and culture.
According to the Ministry of Finance, from February 24, 2022, Ukraine received from Western countries and international financial organizations (IMF, EIB, and World Bank) $38.5 billion.
Unfortunately, in the case of military aid, not everything is so transparent, and although the allies mostly publicly declare the allocation of weapons, equipment and machinery for a certain amount, it is not known for sure (for military reasons) when this aid arrives.
So in this case, you can use the calculations of the Kiel Institute (Kiel Institute), which monitors Western aid to Ukraine in the financial, military and humanitarian spheres.
So, in general, the partners provided or plan to provide Ukraine (what has already been officially declared) military aid worth 62.24 billion euros (at the current exchange rate - about $66 billion. The same story with humanitarian aid - Western countries allocated $12.8 billion.
The institute notes that it does not take into account any donations: from companies, charities, or international organizations, such as the UN or the Red Cross, due to a "lack of reliable data". In any case, their help will be much less than that of partners. To summarize, international aid related to the war is $117.3 billion.
With the losses of housing, infrastructure, and business, as well as military expenditures from the budget, $311.1 billion is obtained.
And these are only direct losses and expenses related to the war. It is problematic to estimate the overall impact of Russian aggression.
It is not clear how many businesses were closed without direct missile hits, how many people left and do not create GDP here, how many companies lost income due to closed ports and countless other similar "how many?".
