Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s chief of staff suggested in an interview on Sunday that the latter may abstain at the next European summit on a vote on European financial aid offered to Ukraine, although he still hopes that by then an agreement will be found acceptable to all decisions. member states.

“It’s not what we want to do, but it’s unpredictable,” Orbán’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, said in an interview with private TV channel ATV and carried by EFE on Sunday, according to Agerpres. He was responding after being asked if other European leaders could invite Orbán to coffee at the European summit on February 1 during the vote on aid to Ukraine, as they did on December 14 when the start of negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the EU, when Orbán left room for consensus.

As for the start of these negotiations, the Hungarian Prime Minister eventually agreed to abstain, instead blocking with a veto the EU’s financial aid for Ukraine in the amount of 50 billion euros for the next four years.

While continuing negotiations with Budapest on the lifting of this veto right, the European Commission is looking for alternative solutions, such as concluding a loan of 20 billion euros and providing this amount to Ukraine. Hungary also opposes this loan scheme, which is similar to the financing of the European recovery plan after the pandemic, as all member states will eventually have to repay this loan later through their own contributions to the EU budget.

Another solution, put forward even by Viktor Orbán on December 21, is for “everyone to put on the table what they can offer” to Ukraine, implying that he could still support a decision that every EU member state supports Ukraine through bilateral agreements. .

His opposition to the financial aid assigned to Ukraine is due not only to the tension between Budapest and Kyiv regarding the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia, but also to the blocking of Hungary’s access to European funds by the European Commission, which accuses Orbán of violating the rule of law.

Hungary’s prime minister, the only European leader to maintain close ties with Russia after it launched military aggression against Ukraine, accuses Brussels of blocking European funds belonging to Hungary for purely political reasons, namely because of the conservative the orientation of the Hungarian government and the measures taken by it against illegal migration and the LGBT community

This month, the European Commission unblocked €10.2 billion of cohesion funds for Hungary, as well as €920 million from the European REPowerEU plan, but other European funds (cohesion and for the post-pandemic recovery plan) amounting to more than €21 billion still remain frozen. , and Orban insists on their complete unblocking and believes that regarding the financial aid assigned to Ukraine, it should not be provided from the EU budget.

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