6 Dec 2022 14:56

Hungary blocks EU allocating 18 bln euros in financial assistance to Ukraine in 2023

BRUSSELS. Dec 6 (Interfax) - Hungary's Finance Minister Mihaly Varga, on behalf of the country, has spoken against the European Council's adopting of legislative amendments that would allow Ukraine to receive 18 billion euros in macro-financial assistance in 2023.

"Hungary is against an amendment to the financial legislation," Varga said on Tuesday in Brussels during the open part of the meeting of the Economic and Financial Affairs Council.

Czech Finance Minister Zbynek Stanjura chaired the meeting and said that, "Unfortunately, we have been unable to adopt the package as a whole. However, this will not dampen our ambitions to start disbursing our assistance to Ukraine beginning in January. I ask the Economic and Finance Committee to find an alternative solution. This means that we must find a solution that all countries support. We will find a solution to support Ukraine."

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban had previously said that Budapest was against the EU's plan to provide Ukraine with an 18-billion-euro aid package next year.

"The question is how to assist Ukraine. According to one of the proposals, we should use the budgets of the EU countries in order to take new loans together and give this money to Ukraine. We do not support this proposal, because we do not want the EU to become a community of debtor states instead of a community of cooperating states," the Associated Press quoted Orban as saying.

Orban has instead invited all EU members to use funds from their own respective budgets in order to assist Ukraine via bilateral agreements.

As reported previously, the Hungarian government decided to allocate 187 million euros in order to participate in providing financial assistance to Ukraine. The political director of the prime minister's office, Balazs Orban, has specified that the funds would not be allocated from the national budget as part of a single EU plan for a new aid package for Ukraine. "This will be namely Hungary's contribution to the total EU assistance of 18 billion euros, though not through a common program," Orban stressed.

The European Parliament at the end of November approved allocating the assistance to Kiev.

The European Commission proposed providing Ukraine up to 18 billion euros in 2023 in a new format of macro-financial support, "macro-financial assistance plus", in regular payments. The new financial assistance program has not yet been approved and contains a number of terms and conditions, particularly adopting measures to strengthen governance and fight corruption.

Kiev currently receives support from Brussels as part of a macro-financial assistance program totaling nine billion euros, as approved in the summer of 2022. Ukraine has received 5.5 billion euros of the funds, with another 500 million euros expected to be allocated in December. European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis recently noted that the final three billion euros of the program would be included in a proposed 18-billion-euro loan package to assist Ukraine next year.