Interestingly, Ukraine is so considered yesterday’s news in some circles that the latest blow to its rapidly sinking fortunes is getting no press play. While the BBC and the Financial Times have the Hungary veto of the proposed €50 billion of new EU funds to Ukraine as the lead story, it is literally not to be found on the first page of the online Wall Street Journal. Apparently the finance paper’s editors have deemed Ukraine’s new money prospects to be tantamount to nil after the second failure n Congress to secure $60 billion (and now a Biden impeachment inquiry on). Note that Congress agreed on a mere $300 million for now as the (what looks to be lost) fight over the $60 billon continues. Oddly there seems to be no proposal for a smaller multi-billion package in play.
In other words, any significant new funds of the EU would be a last ditch. It is hard to see large scale additional support forthcoming after the US cut its money spigot.
We’ll soon turn to the fact that EU leaders are still in denial as to the state of play, that more money (even more so if the EU is largely going it alone) will not salvage Project Ukraine. They still plan to get Ukraine the funds in the new year.
This is the Journal’s lone Ukraine piece….at least above the fold:
Bloomberg does have a story on Hungary’s funding veto…below the fold: Hungary Vetoes Ukraine Aid After EU Agrees on Membership Talks. Keep in mind that Hungary literally sat out the EU membership vote, with Orban leaving the room to allow a technical unanimous approval. Orban pointedly noted that any eventual Ukraine ascension would be subject to Hungary’s Parliamentary approval, which was far from assured. Bloomberg noted:
The move is a somewhat symbolic one. The bloc won’t launch the more formal negotiating framework before March, when Ukraine has been asked to meet several additional conditions related to its membership bid.
Even with a green light from member states, the negotiations would still take years as the path to membership is lengthy and complicated. Croatia was the last country to join the bloc and its application lasted 10 years before it was formally accepted in 2013.
Of course, this discussion also pre-supposes that there will be a Ukraine to enter, as opposed to say, Greater Galacia or Lambert’s favorite, the Free City of Kiev.
Needless to say, there is a lot of pundit and comments section consternation about Hungary, with about 2% of the EU’s total population, throwing a spanner in the world. Conveniently forgotten is the reason small countries were willing to join the EU in the first place was that they had strong protections of their rights. The Financial Times’ comment section contains lots of bright ideas about changing voting rules on the fly, such as:
Tyler_Durden7
There should be a qualified majority in the EU, let’s say 80%.It cannot be that a single state can veto such an important and strategic decision.
Also, Hungary should decide whether it is pro Europe or pro Russia, maybe there is no place for pro Russian countries in the EU anymore. Maybe we should welcome Ukraine and kick out Hungary.
But some in the peanut gallery are getting their digs in:
Nuffsaid
Can anyone explain how the EU benefits from having Hungary as a member? It seems much more aligned with the Russian empire.Olaf the First
in reply to Nuffsaid
Can anyone explain how the EU benefits from having Ukraine as a member?
The EU officialdom is applying large amounts of porcine maquillage:
The EU welcomes Ukraine home! pic.twitter.com/WtjHrMvxmy
— UNITED24media (@United24media) December 14, 2023
And vowing Ukraine will get its dough. From the Financial Times:
EU leaders gathering in Brussels have vowed to find a way to support Ukraine after Hungary’s Viktor Orbán vetoed a €50bn lifeline for the war-torn country.
Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said that “Ukraine will not be left without support” and that there was a “strong will” among the other 26 EU member states to deliver the necessary aid. Belgian PM Alexander De Croo also reassured Kyiv that “we will be there to support you, we need to figure out a few details”.
In the early hours of Friday, EU leaders failed to convince the Hungarian prime minister to agree to the €50bn funding package for Ukraine, which would have come from the bloc’s common budget and be paid to Kyiv over the next four years in the form of grants and loans.
The EU’s leaders will reconvene for a summit in January for further talks in the hope that they can bring Orbán on board or force the package of support through without his backing.
Yves here. It’s hard to see how Orban will be more tractable in January. Politico claimed the EU was working on bribing Orban, and his ask was the release of all the EU funds held back so far. Mind you, that’s €10 billion, so one would think Hungary comes out ahead even effectively having to kick some back to Ukraine. Apparently the EU did agree but Orban decided no. His objection was that he viewed giving Hungarian funds to Ukraine via the EU to be a violation of Hungary’s rights.
One wonders if Orban trusted the EU to live up to its side of the deal.
Absent some new-found means for appeasing Orban, Ukraine will look like more of a lost cause in January, so the news will be favoring his stance.
The other way to get more dough to Ukraine is for member states to agree to fund it out of their national budgets. As the pink paper explained:
Estonia’s [Kaja] Kallas said that a solution among the 26, outside the EU budget, could be found but warned it would take more time.
EU economies will be further on their way into recession. If there is particularly cold weather, budgets will be under more strain than planned due to higher expenditures for energy subsidies.
And then we have the elephant in the room, that Germany, which normally provides about 25% of total EU funding, is in the midst of a budget crisis due to an adverse German constitutional court ruling, barring it from applying a funding authorization for Covid emergency monies to other uses. The normal budget hairshirt rules means Germany has no other pocket for finding meaningful new funds.
Europe is the master of fudge and kick the can. Perhaps they’ll find a way to bludgeon Orban into line, but that seems not very likely. Perhaps they can cobble together a deal outside the EU common budget. EU experts please opine, but I see it hard for them to get to €50 billion that way. Could there still be some special pockets or tricks?
