Bank Capital and Sovereign Debt Holdings: Ukrainian Banks as a Financing Channel for Government Bonds, 2017-2026
Description
This dataset tracks the regulatory and statutory capital of Ukraine's banking system alongside banks' holdings of domestic government bonds (OVDP) and the share of government bonds in total banking system assets, from 2017 to 2026. The dataset is designed to support research on the "banks as a channel for sovereign debt financing" mechanism, sometimes discussed in the literature as financial repression or crowding-in of government debt through the banking system. Government bond holdings grew from 312.5 billion UAH (11.5 billion USD) in 2017 to a peak of 605.2 billion UAH (22.2 billion USD) in 2022, the year the NBU raised the discount rate to 25.0% in response to the full-scale invasion, before falling back and then climbing again to 1,036.3 billion UAH (23.1 billion USD) by 2026. Throughout this period, government bonds have consistently represented between roughly a fifth and a third of total banking system assets, a large and persistent allocation by any international standard. IMPORTANT DATA REVISION (v2): the 2025 and 2026 values of Govt_Bonds_Holdings_UAH_mn (and the derived USD and share-of-assets columns) were revised downward following independent verification. The author's original compiled source figures (990.8 billion UAH for 2025 and 1,036.3 billion UAH for 2026) were approximately 10-12% higher than figures subsequently found in NBU-sourced reporting (Mind.ua, February 2026, reporting the OVDP portfolio grew 6% during 2025 to reach 937.0 billion UAH by year-end, implying approximately 884.0 billion UAH at the start of 2025) and in the NBU's own "Огляд банківського сектору" (Banking Sector Review) publications. The 2025 and 2026 rows in this dataset now use these independently-sourced figures (884.0 and 937.0 billion UAH respectively). The exact cause of the original discrepancy could not be conclusively established - possible explanations include a different scope in the author's original source table (e.g., inclusion of non-resident OVDP holdings or NBU certificates of deposit alongside bank-owned OVDP) or a data compilation error - and readers should be aware that the 2017-2024 values in this dataset have NOT been independently re-verified against primary NBU tables and are presented as originally compiled, with the same residual uncertainty this implies. CONTACT INFORMATION Illia Kyselov, PhD in Law Associate Professor, Department of Law, Bohdan Khmelnytsky Melitopol State Pedagogical University, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine CMSA (R), FPWMP (R), and BIDA (R) (Corporate Finance Institute) Email: illiakyselov86@gmail.com The author is open to collaboration on Scopus-indexed publications and further research using Ukrainian economic and financial statistics. Inquiries regarding this dataset, potential co-authorship, or data requests are welcome.