The International Monetary Fund agreed to release the next tranche of a loan to Ukraine on July 20, paving the way for $690 million to be disbursed to Kyiv, despite the country failing to meet all of the loan program's targets.The Washington-based lender called Ukraine's performance "broadly satisfactory" in a press release announcing its approval, but emphasized that several conditions of the program were either completed with a delay or missed entirely. Ukraine is on its second wartime IMF program, which will lend more than $8 billion to Kyiv over four years to 2030. Kyiv, which relies on continued injections of foreign cash to keep its finances afloat, receives the cash in tranches as long as it keeps up with a pipeline of reforms, which aim to combat corruption, address tax avoidance, and de-shadow the economy. The country's parliament repeatedly failed to pass through some of those conditions throughout the first months of 2026, amid widespread unpopularity of the changes. Most toxic was a package of new taxes, including the end of a VAT-exemption for self-employed entrepreneurs, a widely used employment status in Ukraine, a tax on small imported parcels, and a tax on income received from digital platforms, such as Uber.