Hungary was the only country that voted against the 2023 financial aid package worth 18 billion euros ($18.7 billion) for Ukraine, but it will allocate its share of assistance to Kiev on a bilateral basis, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Tuesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th December, 2022) Hungary was the only country that voted against the 2023 financial aid package worth 18 billion Euros ($18.7 billion) for Ukraine, but it will allocate its share of assistance to Kiev on a bilateral basis, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Tuesday.
Earlier in the day, European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said that the EU Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) failed to reach an agreement on the 2023 financial loan for Ukraine, as one of the member states opposed the idea.
"We, Hungarians, agree with the idea of supporting Ukraine. We will give our share of the amount determined by the European Union to Ukraine on a bilateral basis... We will allocate our share of support from our budget. What did we vote against? We voted against the joint credit as a source of this support. This is what we don't really support," Szijjarto told a press conference of the Visegrad Group foreign ministers.
Budapest believes that the EU's future does not lie in common debt, the Hungarian top diplomat added.
"We disagree that the European Union should become a 'loan union.' This is our principled point of view," he said.
Szijjarto also recalled that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban had signed a decree to allocate 187 million euros to Kiev from the state budget. The country's leader instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade to contact Ukrainian counterparts and prepare a bilateral agreement to transfer the funds.
Western countries have been actively providing Kiev with financial assistance since Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24. On November 9, the European Commission proposed a loan of 18 billion euros for Kiev in 2023. Later in the month, the measure was approved by the European Parliament. Now it has to get the final approval from the ECOFIN.
The package, averaging 1.5 billion euros per month, is expected to help Ukraine cover a significant part of its funding needs in 2023, which the Ukrainian authorities and the International Monetary Fund estimate at 3-4 billion euros per month.
