Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban prevented an agreement on new financial aid for Ukraine at the EU summit in Brussels. The heads of state and government should now deal with this again in January.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban prevented an agreement on new financial aid for Ukraine at the EU summit in Brussels. As Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced, the EU heads of state and government have now decided to discuss the aid funds again in January.
“We have reached an agreement with the 26 countries. Victor Orban, Hungary, has not been able to do that yet. I am quite confident that we can reach an agreement at the beginning of next year, we are thinking at the end of January,” Rutte said, adding that we still have time and that Ukraine won’t run out of money in the next week.
EU Council President Charles Michel said: “We will come back to this issue early next year and try to achieve unanimity.”
No 50 billion for Ukraine
It was actually supposed to be decided at the summit to budget a total of 50 billion euros to support Ukraine in the coming years. 17 billion euros of this should flow as grants and 33 billion euros as loans.
There are also plans to adjust other areas of the long-term EU budget from 2021 to 2027. At the request of countries like Italy, there should also be additional money for the competitiveness of industry and migration policy.
However, these plans are also initially affected by Hungary’s veto. Orban had already criticized the EU Commission’s proposals for revising the long-term budget before the summit as “unfounded, unbalanced and unrealistic”.
Until the end, however, the other heads of state and government had hoped that they could persuade him to agree with compromise offers. The summit had actually started positively. Orban surprisingly made it possible to decide on the start of accession negotiations with Ukraine by not taking part in the decisive vote.