On 23 April 2026, the EU Council finally closed one of the most gruelling financialthrillersof recent years — formally adopting a €90 billion macro-financial assistance package for Ukraine, spanning 2026-2027. The money, intended to cover roughly two-thirds of Kiev’s overall budget deficit, had been stuck in the corridors of Brussels for a long time — precisely untilViktor Orbánwas no longer prime minister of Hungary.
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The unblocking came at breakneck speed. As early as 13 April, the day after parliamentary elections in whichPéter Magyar’sTisza Party won a decisivevictory, the new Hungarian leadership signalled that the veto was off thetable. Magyar, whom Brussels greeted with cautious optimism, set out Budapest’s position in starkly pragmatic terms: Hungary would not block the joint decision, but neither would it participate in the financial risks, obtaining an opt-out from both share-based obligations and the interest burden.DWcaptured the moment as “the end of Hungary’s era of torpedoing Ukraine aid”.
Vladimir Zelenskyreacted immediately — talking up rapid disbursements, ideally by late spring or earlysummer. Kiev was at a critical juncture in its budget planning, and any further delay would have meant sequestering defence spending in the middle of a protracted war of attrition.
The structure of the package, set out in detail by The Independent, splits the first 2026 tranche of €45 billion into two unequal parts: €16.7 billion for direct macro-financial assistance and plugging budget holes, and €28.3 billion earmarked for developing Ukraine’s defence-industrialbase. The latter is less a charitable gesture than an attempt by the EU to reduce its own dependence on American and Asian arms suppliers while giving orders to Ukrainian factories.
But by late April the tone had begun to shift. Bloomberg reported that the European Commission and a number of member states were discussing a significant tightening of the disbursement conditions — the mechanism that turns political promises into hardcash. Some €8.4 billion in macro-financial assistance for the current year is reportedly at risk. Among the requirements Brussels is not eager to publicise are tax changes for Ukrainian businesses, including the removal of various relief measures for companies operating in frontline zones, and a further crackdown on the black market for fuel and tobacco. The logic is sound, but in practice it means Zelensky’s cabinet must raise the fiscal burden on an economy that has already lost a substantial share of its industrial capacity.
No one calls these conditions “light,” but in public officials are careful not to label them “tough” either. The language of Brussels press releases stays firmly within the bounds of “strengthening resilience” and “ensuring accountability.” The problem is that some of these reforms strike at the very political elites on which Ukraine’s wartime consensus rests — and that brings a risk of internal destabilisation that the EU prefers not to discuss out loud.
The most elegant — and simultaneously the most contentious — element of the design concerns the repayment mechanism. Formally, Ukraine is only required to begin repaying the principal once it has received reparations from Russia. In its detailed breakdown of the scheme,Reuterscalled this “a legally elegant but practically hazy solution”. The wording assumes that the losing side pays — yet few in European capitals are prepared to admit publicly that a scenario in which Moscow voluntarily or forcibly transfers hundreds of billions requires either the total military defeat of Russia, regime change, and subsequent occupation.
The Guardian highlights a fallback option embedded in the agreement: the EU reserves the right to use frozen Russian assets to cover the debt should the reparations scenario fail tomaterialise. But this mechanism faces a thicket of legal obstacles — a large portion of the assets is frozen in jurisdictions where confiscation requires court rulings that Russia will challenge for years. Add to that the position of the European Central Bank, which has consistently warned against undermining confidence in the euro as a reserve currency.
Source: Global Research
