Minister of Social Policy Oksana Zholnovych declares the need to develop the system of social services in the country.

"The entire system of social support today, unfortunately, we inherited from the Soviet Union, from Soviet times. And for a very long period of time it was built according to a similar narrative, when very many people were encouraged to have paternalistic sentiments: "let's give you some small payment and forget about you." But that doesn't work. And today, we see that we have a huge "army" of recipients of various types of benefits, and the social policy budget is the largest budget in the entire government. It is clear that at some point the limit may simply come," Zholnovych said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

According to her, today, there are several dependents per working person, and each of them must receive adequate assistance.

"Therefore, if we are talking about support of UAH 1,000, it means nothing. It should be at least UAH 5,000. Can we pay that much? And then how much taxes do we need to collect from everyone? Somewhere this is justified, somewhere- "then we, as a state, as a society, must definitely support the people who need it most. These are, for example, people of disabled age, people with complex disabilities," the minister added.

Zholnovych noted that in other cases, "by smearing such support with small payments, we do not solve anything," because there is a huge range of issues that cannot be resolved with payments.

"And when I spoke about the need to reformat all this social, I precisely meant that we radically need to increase social services, develop them, think as much as possible about where we could find resources for these services. Because by inflating payments, which is being talked about a lot again, we will not achieve anything, but we can destroy the economy of our state," she said.

According to the minister, services should be provided to communities, but they do not understand what to provide, do not know how to do it, and in many cases do not have sufficient resources.

"Now, we are reformatting such opportunities so that each community can simply purchase a service through a national purchaser for its people from different suppliers, so that they do not need to create and hold anything, so that these mechanisms are simpler and market-based. Then it will be possible to co-finance from different budgets: from local, from regional, from state," Zholnovych said.