Germany is seeking to cut the €20 billion EU fund for Ukraine, arguing that the European Peace Facility should take into account the billions in military aid it has provided to Kyiv bilaterally – The Telegraph reported.
It is known that since the beginning of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, the EPF has provided Ukraine with €4.5 billion worth of weapons and has conducted preparations for 34,000 Ukrainian troops as part of an EU training mission.
Military support for Ukraine can be provided either through financial contributions to the Ukraine envelope in the EPF or as direct deliveries of military equipment to Ukraine, Berlin says in its papers.
Because Berlin is the EU’s largest economy and contributes a quarter of the EPF, it announced last month that it would double military aid to Ukraine in 2024 by signing an €8 billion package.
Nevertheless, Germany has often resorted to accusations of the following pattern: that the bloc’s member states are abusing the EPF scheme by sending old weapons to Ukraine and using the compensation to modernise their armed forces. As a consequence, Berlin rejected the European Commission’s request to allocate €100 billion to top up the EU’s general budget, financed by member states, where €50 billion will go to support Ukraine over the next 4 years, with the rest to be allocated to domestic issues: repaying the general debt, the migration issue and raising salaries of officials.
This situation has arisen due to the limit on public spending. Olaf Scholz told his EU colleagues that he fully supports the issue of financing Ukraine and supporting it for as long as it takes to win and rebuild, but the court in Karlsruhe ruled that his government had contravened the constitutional “debt brake” that sets a limit on public spending.
European Union leaders will raise the issue of EPF reorganization when they meet in Brussels for the last European Council summit of the month.
