Ukraine's central bank is advertising record gross reserves while passing over an IMF target it missed, according to Kyrylo Shevchenko, who ran the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) from 2020 to 2022.

"The NBU keeps congratulating itself on Ukraine's 'record' international reserves. The latest IMF report tells a much less comfortable story," he wrote on September 12. "According to the IMF, Ukraine missed its end-June target for net international reserves by a significant margin. The shortfall was about $2.9bn to $3.1bn."

The direction of that claim is corroborated and the size of it is not. The IMF's board completed the first review of Ukraine's four-year Extended Fund Facility on July 20, releasing SDR503mn, about $690mn, and said all end-March quantitative performance criteria were met. It did not address the end-June position in that release. EU Today, reporting on the same review, said Ukraine missed its end-June net international reserves target but gave no figure. The $2.9bn to $3.1bn range is Shevchenko's and could not be verified against the published country report.

The underlying numbers are not in dispute. Ukraine's international reserves fell 5% in August to $48.7bn, from $51.2bn, while net reserves fell 6.9% to $33.8bn, leaving about four months of import cover, on National Bank figures reported by Interfax-Ukraine. Heavy central bank intervention in the foreign exchange market and slowing foreign aid drove the fall.

Shevchenko's argument is about what those figures mean rather than what they are. Gross reserves have been built "to a very large extent through unprecedented foreign financial assistance", he wrote, and "record gross reserves financed by record external inflows are not proof that Ukraine's external position has become structurally stronger". He said the Fund points to the missed target, higher intervention and the need to rebuild buffers and allow more exchange rate flexibility, and that the bank should be discussing the same risks rather than producing "self-congratulatory PR".

The messenger complicates the message. Shevchenko resigned as governor in October 2022 citing health, left Ukraine, and was later charged with embezzlement over his earlier tenure at state-owned Ukrgasbank. A court issued an arrest warrant. He denies wrongdoing and has said the case is an abuse of power against him. He now comments on Ukrainian monetary policy from outside the country.

The substance sits inside a real constraint. Reserves are the buffer absorbing every delay in external financing, and Ukraine is carrying an unsecured external gap that Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko puts at $32.6bn for 2027. A reserve stock underwritten by disbursements that are themselves conditional on parliamentary votes is a different thing from one built on export earnings, which is the distinction Shevchenko is drawing and the one the bank's headline figure does not make.

The National Bank had not responded to the criticism when this was written.