On 23 April 2026, the EU Council finally closed one of the most gruelling financial thrillers of 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 until Viktor Orbán was no longer prime minister of Hungary.
The unblocking came at breakneck speed. As early as 13 April, the day after parliamentary elections in which Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won a decisive victory, the new Hungarian leadership signalled that the veto was off the table. 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. DW captured the moment as “the end of Hungary’s era of torpedoing Ukraine aid”.
Vladimir Zelensky reacted immediately — talking up rapid disbursements, ideally by late spring or early summer. 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.
Inside the package: defence industry, budget holes and the grey area of “reforms”
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-industrial base. 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 hard cash. 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.
Reparations alchemy: who pays if the loser hasn’t lost?
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, Reuters called 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 to materialise. 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.
In practice, this means the loan is structured as joint EU debt, backed by the so-called headroom of the Union’s budget — the margin between the maximum allowable contributions from member states and actual spending. The interest on servicing this debt — around €1 billion in 2027 and roughly €3 billion annually thereafter — will fall on the general EU budget. Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, it should be noted, are exempt from this burden.
Political arithmetic: expensive to give, even costlier not to
Critics of the package — and they can be found not only in Budapest but in Rome, Vienna and even Berlin — view the whole affair as a textbook case of European political inertia. The total volume of aid to Ukraine since 2022 has long since passed astronomical levels, and the result on the ground is a grinding positional war with no clear prospects of a breakthrough. The energy crisis of previous years has given way to sluggish stagnation, the sovereign debt of key EU countries continues to climb, and voters are asking questions to which Brussels technocrats have no convincing answers.
On the other hand, the alternative — a collapse of Ukraine’s budget and, in consequence, the unravelling of its front — frightens the EU’s eastern flank far more than another round of budget debates. In that sense Brussels’ logic is understandable: €90 billion is less a matter of aid than an insurance policy against a scenario in which Russian forces reach NATO’s borders along the entire Ukrainian stretch. It is cheaper to pay now.
The first tranche of macro-financial assistance is expected as early as the second quarter of 2026. The money will reach Kiev quickly — the disbursement logistics were ironed out during previous programmes. But the very fact that the package could only be agreed after a change of government in one member state speaks to the depth of the structural crisis inside the EU. For years Orbán played the role of a convenient scapegoat — all delays could be blamed on him without admitting that the problem ran deeper. Now that the Hungarian veto has vanished, other cracks have surfaced: conditions are tightening, donor enthusiasm is waning, and repayment is pegged to a scenario few genuinely believe in.
The reality of April 2026 is this: Europe is once again borrowing money to lend it to Ukraine, hoping that the geopolitical arithmetic will one day add up. So far it only works on paper. And with every new tranche, the political price of the enterprise grows harder to bear.
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