STATE BUDGET OF UKRAINE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CULTURAL RESILIENCE UNDER MARTIAL LAW

Abstract

The state budget, in conditions where society pays a high price for survival, is not reduced to a financial plan and actually works as an architecture of priorities, restrictions and permissions. Expenditure on culture in this architecture is not measured solely by the volume of appropriations. The article examines Ukraine’s state budget as an instrument for sustaining cultural resilience under martial law. It argues that the Russian-Ukrainian war has transformed the budget from a technical financial plan into a politico-fiscal architecture that defines the boundaries of trade-offs between defence and other state functions, thereby placing the budget process in a regime of continuous choice among competing needs. The article shows that wartime cultural financing cannot be assessed solely in nominal terms, because budget-choice mechanisms, the composition of expenditures, and execution performance are decisive for understanding actual support. Empirically, the analysis of budget indicators reveals a slight increase in planned cultural spending alongside a simultaneous deterioration in execution. It further emphasises that energy-security, inflationary, and other macroeconomic pressures increase the effective “unit cost of a cultural service” – primarily through higher energy prices, logistics costs, and the operating expenses of institutions – so that even stable nominal allocations may translate into reduced real capacity in the volume, regularity, and quality of services delivered. The study also contends that, during wartime, Ukraine’s state budget should maintain a minimally sufficient cultural presence as an element of national resilience and social cohesion by safeguarding access to basic cultural services. Finally, the post-war transition requires mechanisms that prevent symbolic cultural expenditures from crowding out systematic financing for core cultural functions, infrastructure recovery, and the preservation of cultural collections, ensuring that spending is oriented toward rebuilding baseline capacities rather than short-term effects.