At the 14th Civil Society Forum organized by ISAR Ednannia, Viktor Maziarchuk, Head of the Fiscal Policy Research Center, presented the results of three years of work on the “Cost of War” project. During this time, the team collected and verified data on the financing of recovery for over 4,500 projects totaling nearly UAH 30 billion.
“What do I mean by verification? For each project, I can show all the actual payments that went into its recovery. Not theoretical or speculative figures, but real expenditures,” the expert emphasized.
According to Maziarchuk, “Cost of War” is currently the only database in Ukraine that fully consolidates and verifies recovery financing data from three sources: the state budget, local budgets, and international assistance. The Center’s approach involves multi-level verification to ensure that all payment amounts align with official reporting.
“We work with big data. The Treasury publishes around 20 million payment transactions each year, and we need to identify those related to recovery. Prozorro contains another 3.5 million procurements, with no marker indicating ‘this is recovery’ or ‘this is not.’ In addition, we have to link payments to procurements, which is a separate challenge,” he explained.
The expert also stressed that data quality remains one of the key challenges in the recovery sector. Due to errors, duplication, inconsistent formats, and the lack of unified standards, information is fragmented and requires in-depth technical and substantive verification.
The Fiscal Policy Research Center not only systematizes and verifies this data but also openly shares it with government institutions, think tanks, journalists, and anyone working on recovery-related issues.
