“Hungary is against an amendment to the financial legislation,” the minister said in Brussels at the open part of the meeting of the Council for Economic and Financial Affairs, his words are quoted by Interfax.
Commenting on this situation, Czech Finance Minister Zbigniew Stanyura presiding over the meeting acknowledged that the EU countries "could not accept the package as a whole."
“However, this will not dampen our ambitions to start distributing our aid to Ukraine from the beginning of January.
I ask the Economics and Finance Committee to find an alternative solution.
This means that we must find a solution that all states will support.
We will find a solution to support Ukraine,” he said.
According to the British newspaper The Independent, Hungary thus blocked a package of financial assistance to Kyiv.
On November 6, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, during a conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, informed him about the EU’s plans to issue budgetary assistance to Ukraine for 2023 with a total volume of € 18 billion in the form of “very soft loans”.
The Hungarian Foreign Ministry opposed an initiative aimed at providing assistance to Ukraine at the expense of funds jointly collected with other EU member states.
The country's prime minister, Viktor Orban, proposed instead to determine what total amount should be provided to Ukrainians and distribute it among the EU states "proportionately and fairly."