Ukraine risks losing up to $29.5bn of donor budget money unless the cabinet completes reforms by its October 15 deadline, Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi warned on September 30.

The cabinet has completed 17 of the 42 decisions it owes international partners and will finish the rest by October 15, Koretskyi said on Telegram later the same day. The remainder depends on parliament. The government has asked the Verkhovna Rada, which has held no plenary sitting since September 17, to reconvene on October 12, a day earlier than planned, and vote through the bills, Koretskyi told a press conference, Interfax-Ukraine reported.

"We must pass everything - both resolutions and laws. Then we will receive all the money. This is critically important," Koretskyi said, warning that partners also need time to ratify and pay out before the end of the year.

Kyiv is now squeezed from two directions. This year's money is hostage to its own legislature, while next year's hole is opening faster than donors are filling it, after preliminary IMF figures put the shortfall at up to $54bn through 2029. Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk said on September 21 that 18 of the 45 bills tied to international commitments had yet to arrive from the government, and that normal procedure allows 14 days from submission to first reading and 14 more to second, Ukrinform reported. The Rada rejected nine of 11 financing-linked bills on September 1, pushing the IMF's second review back to December. Kyiv faced a similar warning in April, when missed benchmarks put up to $30bn of foreign funding at risk.

Brussels made the same point at the Ukraine Donor Platform meeting on September 29. "Deliver the agreed reforms, so we can continue supporting you financially," Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos told Kyiv, Euronews reported. EU officials are frustrated that Ukraine is asking for fresh money before doing the work needed to unlock aid already agreed, and the European Commission has yet to validate the figures Kyiv presented, the outlet said.

Finance Minister Serhii Marchenko told the meeting Ukraine needs $52.6bn of external financing in 2027, of which sources for about $20bn have been identified, leaving $32.6bn uncovered, the Cabinet of Ministers said. That is the same gap the draft 2027 budget carried when the government approved it on September 15. Adding about $45bn of next year's defence spending that allies have not guaranteed takes the total shortfall to roughly $78bn, according to Euronews.

"We're very happy with the €90bn. But it's not sufficient," Marchenko said of the EU's Ukraine Support Loan, which is funded by joint EU borrowing and covers 2026 and 2027. Its first budget-support cash, about €800mn, arrived only in September as part of a payment under the Ukraine Facility, the bloc's separate €50bn reform-linked package.

This year's defence bill is not covered either. Koretskyi put the total cost of the war in 2026 at $155bn, including weapons partners supply in kind rather than in cash. Of that, $27bn is still unfunded: about $7bn will come from spending cuts and reallocations, and the remaining $20bn is under negotiation with partners. Koretskyi said the $20bn would pay advances on weapons production, including long-range systems, and that Ukraine's ability to fight actively in 1Q27 depended on it.

Marchenko said it was the first time since 2022 that Ukraine's tax and customs administrations had underperformed, even though the cabinet put tax and customs revenue for January-August at $34.1bn, up 14.5% year-on-year.

Kyiv's answer is the €210bn of Russian central bank assets frozen in the EU, most of them at Euroclear in Brussels. "We need our friends, our European politicians, to be brave enough and to make some bold actions," Marchenko told a European Policy Centre panel on September 28.

"Unfortunately, the war is longer, the war is harder, and we need to provide some resolution of frozen Russian assets or provide other means for us to survive," he said.

Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland, backed by the Baltic states, have called for new options to tap the assets, but Belgium has resisted the Commission's plan to move them into a special vehicle unless it is fully shielded from Russian lawsuits.