The former Minister of Defense of Ukraine, Oleksiy Reznikov, said that a day of war with Russia costs Ukraine 100 million dollars and that the vast majority of funds come from the state budget, writes Ukrainian Pravda.
He said this in an extended interview with Ukrinform after he was asked why there are so few drones in the Ukrainian military and why they are bought with funds that citizens give to volunteers, and not with budget funds.
“I can tell you that supplies from volunteers from February 24, 2022 to today are 3% of everything that went to the war. A day of war costs us 100 million dollars. Now take the budgets of all the big volunteer foundations, see how much they collect,” he urged.
Reznikov added that it is unfair to say that volunteers do everything to equip the Armed Forces, because this is not the case at all.
“Actually, this is done by the citizens of Ukraine – those who work, because they pay taxes and these taxes go to the budget, and from this budget they also go to the army. The modern army is the largest consumer of funds. But funds are also needed for the maintenance of the country as a whole: for infrastructure, for reconstruction, for the support of those who need social protection,” explained Reznikov.
“That’s why we have to work and pay taxes. Business must be active, and we must support entrepreneurs,” he stressed, as Ukraine returned to pre-war tax rates last month.
Ukraine will have a new defense minister
Oleksiy Reznikov gave an interview on Sunday, even before Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced his resignation, but Ukrinform journalists divided it into two parts, the second material was released on Monday morning.
“This week, the parliament will be asked to decide on the changes. I want to present now: I have decided to replace the Minister of Defense of Ukraine. Oleksiy Reznikov spent more than 550 days of war. I believe that the ministry needs new approaches and other formats of interaction both with the army and with society in general,” Zelenskyy said during a speech to the nation at the end of the day.
He also announced that he is proposing Rustem Umerov, head of the Main Privatization Agency of Ukraine, for the position of Minister of Defense.
Umerov, 41, is a Tatar from Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
He was born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to Crimean Tatars who were deported from Soviet Crimea in the 1940s. As of 2020, Umerov is a member of a Ukrainian government task force working on a strategy to expel the Russian occupiers from Crimea.
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Source: Hot News
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