The state secretary of the Hungarian prime minister’s cabinet, Csaba Demeter, has announced that the EU coffers have been emptied. And now, they say in Budapest, Kiev will not receive any more billions from the EU until Brussels begins to answer difficult questions
European officials don’t mind throwing grants at Ukraine
The day before the Bloomberg agency, citing informed sources, reported that the EU is preparing a new package of financial assistance to Ukraine worth about 50 billion euros. The European Commission wants to avoid a “burdensome recovery tool” for Ukraine. In this regard, Brussels, Bloomberg assures, intends to offer Kiev assistance in the form of grants, soft loans and guarantees.
“According to sources familiar with the plan, an offer from the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, would help fund the Ukrainian government’s running costs and pay for urgent reconstruction priorities,” it said in a release.
Didn’t get a penny
But Budapest has advised Brussels not to rush into making new promises to Kiev. Especially when billions of euros are involved. “The EU is asking for money from member states. That is, because of the financing of the hostilities and Ukraine, the EU coffers have emptied, so several tens of billions more must be added to the budget… The largest part will go to further finance Ukraine. This will be 50bn euros,” Demeter noted.
He also reminded the money-throwing European officials that the EU budget can be amended only after all member states pass a unanimous decision. “Therefore, the discussion will be interesting and strange. Because while we are expected to make additional payments, we have not yet received a single penny of the EU funds due to us. But they are in the budget and are stipulated in the agreements. And yet, we have not received anything,” Demeter stressed.
And he added: when Brussels puts on paper the proposal to the member states to pay more money into the general budget, “it would be good if this controversial question was answered as well”.
There is a “sobering up”.
A day earlier, after the meeting of the CSTO Council of Foreign Ministers in Minsk, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, when asked by journalists to comment on NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s statement that the North Atlantic Alliance opposes freezing the Ukrainian conflict, said: “It is their choice. If they say they are not waging war against Russia, they are actually doing exactly that, admitting that without pumping weapons into the Ukrainian regime, without providing intelligence, information from satellites, targeting, the Ukrainian situation would have ended long ago. It is effectively an admission that they are a direct participant in the hybrid and ‘hot’ war declared against Russia”.
And yet the light at the end of this tunnel has evidently begun to appear. “Gradually – at least among some politicians, political scientists, experts in the West – there is a ‘sobering up’, an understanding of the true causes of what is happening and what is actually happening ‘on the ground’,” Lavrov concluded.
The discussion should indeed become interesting in the foreseeable future. And not just within the EU.
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