BUDGET STRATEGY FOR SUPPORTING VETERAN BUSINESS UNDER ECOLOGICAL AND ENERGY CHALLENGES

Abstract

The article substantiates the mutual influences and interdependencies between the budget strategy, state support for economic entities, and the ecological and energy challenges that Ukraine must overcome on its path to European integration, in particular with regard to the comprehensive implementation of the provisions of the European Green Deal, as well as the formation of levers for ensuring future European-oriented economic sustainability and the resilience of economic agents already at the stage of early post-war recovery. It is proven that russia’s full-scale military aggression has dualized the crisis-generating nature of entrepreneurship development, colouring it, on the one hand, with a rapid increase in the number of veterans of the russian-Ukrainian war and, on the other hand, with a reduction in the number of newly created veteran businesses. Drawing parallels between this and the ontogenesis of the budget strategy for supporting veteran business, it has been established that budget policy in this area is at the intersection of the “rise” and “onset of crisis” phases and, given its low orientation towards the need to provide veteran business with a new type of resilience with regard to contemporary ecological and energy challenges, must acquire new anti-crisis features that will allow it to move to a new definition of the “rise” phase. To this end, the paper provides a comparative analysis of the content of the Budget Declaration for the last two programme periods (2026–2028 and 2027–2029) in terms of indicative budget benchmarks for supporting veteran business and ensuring its resilience in order to form the core of economic sustainability under the new ecological and energy normality and the security reality in which Ukraine finds itself. From the standpoint of the budget strategy, this core is formed by the Medium-Term Plan of Priority Public Investments; however, no budget component has been identified that would make it possible to find systemic mutual influences and interdependencies between expenditures on supporting veteran business and resolving the crisis in the energy sector. To address this destructive gap, based on the systematization of the best world practices, the paper proposes and substantiates approaches to the substantive updating of the text of the Budget Declaration for new budget periods, as well as the redesign of individual budget programs of the key spending units.