Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban once again blocked the granting of a loan to Ukraine using frozen Russian assets at the EU summit in Brussels, Bloomberg reports citing sources.
The agency points out that in this way the Hungarian prime minister “kept his promises to postpone any decision until after the elections in the United States.” More than a week ago, the Hungarian Finance Minister Mihai Varga announced this decision in Budapest.
“We believe that this issue, the extension of Russian sanctions, should be resolved after the US elections. “We have to see in what direction the future US administration will move on this issue.” – Reuters quoted him as saying.
The US elections will be held on November 5. Orbán supports the Republican candidate and former president of the United States donald trump. The latter criticized Ukraine’s financing and stated that if he wins he will be able to resolve the conflict even before taking office, having spoken with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine. Vladimir Putin AND Vladimir Zelensky.
Politico wrote that Orban plans to stop allocating loans to Ukraine totaling $50 billion to help Trump win the election. If Ukraine does not receive a loan, Trump will be able to promise his voters that he will not give kyiv a single cent of the US budget and, if he wins, refuse to finance Ukraine.
One of Bloomberg’s interlocutors stressed that Hungary’s position “does not make sense”, since in this case the EU would have to spend more money.
This is the decision of the G7 to grant kyiv additional financing of up to $50 billion until the end of the year. The bulk of it will be a €35 billion loan from the EU, secured by proceeds from blocked Russian assets.
The United States, Canada and Japan, which are the founders of a new fund to help Ukraine, intend to contribute at least $10 billion. A Reuters source said the exact amounts the United States, Japan and Canada will contribute are still being determined, but will be secured by profits from frozen Russian assets. The Financial Intermediaries Fund (FIF) will be administered by the World Bank; its funds will not be used for Ukraine’s military needs.
The United States and the EU were supposed to allocate $20 billion each as part of the initiative, with Canada, Britain and Japan contributing the remaining $10 billion. However, Washington set a condition for the EU to guarantee that the Russian assets would be handed over. They will remain frozen in the block for at least three years. Now this measure is extended every six months.
Hungary is against this.
“We do not support extending the validity of sanctions against the Central Bank of Russia from six months to three years. We do not support this because it would mean that here in Europe some people think that there will be a war during these three years. And this approach is unacceptable to us,” – Orban summons the head of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry Peter Szijjarto October 17 at a meeting of the Hungarian Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs.
The Financial Times, before the creation of a new fund to help Ukraine, wrote that Washington may refuse to demand the guarantees necessary to facilitate the allocation of funds.
After the start of the military operation in Ukraine, Western countries froze the assets of the Russian Central Bank in the form of cash and securities worth about 260 billion euros. More than two thirds of them are in the Belgian Euroclear, clarifies RBC.
