As of 1 April 2016, Ukraine had 12.722bn dollars in international reserves, which is 816m dollars less than a month before.
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) explained that the reserves shrank in March after the government made a number of payments on the state and government-guaranteed debt in the foreign currency. It has spent 853.2m dollars on this over the month. Out of this sum, 473.3m dollars were paid for servicing government domestic loan bonds.
The NBU also returned 436m dollars in a swap operation and paid 11.4m dollars to the IMF.
The NBU sold 2.1m dollars to level out fluctuations in the interbank forex market, which did not notably affect the international reserves. The regulator sold 131.m dollars at currency auctions and bought 129.1m dollars.
In March, 36,969m Japanese yens (about 334m dollars) received from Japanese International Cooperation Agency were added to the reserves.
Ukraine's international reserves now cover 3.4 months of imports.
The volume of gold and currency reserves is the lowest since 1 August 2015, when there were 12.617bn dollars. The reserves then started to grow.