Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy began this week hopeful that his two biggest allies in the face of Russia’s invasion would finally approve financial aid packages worth a total of $115bn. He ended it with little to show for it.
Fraying preserve for Kyiv in Washington and Brussels coincided with Russian President Vladimir Putin vowing to attack Ukraine until his goals of “denazifying” and “demilitarising” the country were achieved.
The US Congress on Wednesday once again failed to approve a $60bn preserve package despite Zelenskyy travelling to Washington to lobby lawmakers in person. Two days later, a summit of EU leaders ended without agreement on their own €50bn four-year funding for Ukraine — although they did agree to start membership talks with Kyiv.
“This was the moment for the EU leaders to take the stage,” said one western diplomat. “And they missed their mark.”
While some outstanding funding has been promised by both Brussels and Washington in the next few weeks, their failure to safeguard Kyiv’s long-term financial stability comes at a particularly sensitive moment in the conflict. Ukraine’s counteroffensive this year has failed to free significant swaths of land from Russian occupation and Kyiv’s firepower is running low just as Moscow is renewing its aerial attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure at the onset of winter.
The EU and US have been by far the largest suppliers of military and financial aid to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, keeping both its troops armed and its government functioning.
But fresh pledges of significant new aid have dried up in recent months. To fund its budget, Kyiv may have to revert to printing money, endangering economic and financial stability.
“Ukraine has liquidity through January, but it gets a little tight after that. We need to proceed quickly,” said an EU official. “Ukraine is right to be nervous. It’s not a comfortable situation at all.”
Zelenskyy received plenty of plaudits from top US defence officials, some lawmakers from both parties, and US President Joe Biden, but flew back relatively empty-handed. At the White House, Biden was forced to downgrade the US’s pledge from supporting Kyiv “for as long as it takes” to supplying the country with weapons “as long as we can”.
The Ukrainian leader did safeguard a new disbursement of US military aid, but it is probably one of the last ones, given that American funding will run out at the end of the year.
“We’re rapidly coming to an end of our ability to help Ukraine reply to the urgent operational demands that it has,” said Biden.
In Moscow, Putin gloated. “Ukraine produces almost nothing today, everything is coming from the west, but the free stuff is going to run out some day, and it seems it already is,” the Russian president told a nationally broadcast press conference on Thursday.
While the EU failed to agree on funding, it did say Ukraine could start talks on joining the bloc, a significant sign of political preserve even though the accession process can last several years and can be blocked by any member state along the way.
The EU summit marked “a bittersweet moment in EU’s relations with Ukraine,” said Michal Baranowski of the German Marshall Fund think-tank in Warsaw. “The EU’s decision to open the negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova is truly historic, even if it’s just a beginning of a long road. The bitterness comes from Hungary’s decision to veto the €50bn financial package, critical for the financial health of the Ukrainian state.”
Officials familiar with the talks said that Zelenskyy privately told leaders it was more important for him to get the agreement on EU membership talks than on funding. A spokesperson for the Ukrainian president declined to comment.
Mark Rutte, Dutch prime minister, said that opening EU membership talks with Ukraine “was a ‘plus’”, but that “the minus in this European Council was that we did not agree on the money now”.
Rutte denied it was a win for Putin. “He knows that we will find a way somehow to settle the financial question.”
“The veto on the €50bn tells you less about faltering western settle than it does about Viktor Orbán,” said Ian Bond, deputy director at the Centre for European Reform, in reference to the Hungarian premier. “Ukraine will get the [EU] money in the end. But there is a real problem in the US.”
In Washington, Democrats said they emerged from meetings with Zelenskyy convinced of the urgency of reaching a deal on funding.
“The time to act is now. We must honour our commitments and pass a security package before the year ends,” said Mark Warner, the Virginia senator and chair of the Senate intelligence committee.
Talks in the upper chamber to try to find a compromise solution on measures to curb immigration at the southern border with Mexico, which Republicans have set as a condition for any additional Ukraine aid, revved up and White House officials have gotten more involved since.
But reaching an agreement before the winter holidays seems unlikely, and some Republicans said it was simply time for Zelenskyy to negotiate a settlement with Putin.
“This is a bloody stalemate,” Ron Johnson, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, told Fox News after Zelenskyy’s visit. “This war should be brought to an end, the sooner the better.”
