As Russia escalates, EU concedes its Ukraine support won't be enough
Kyiv faces a $78 billion hole in its 2027 budget. Brussels plans €45 billion from the EU loan and is looking for more – from Russian assets to the UK, Canada and Japan.
Archive image · Photo: Mihai Barbu / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (cropped and resized)
EU officials are increasingly admitting that current support for Ukraine may fall short, Euronews reports. The €90 billion loan agreed last year was meant to cover about two-thirds of Kyiv's needs for 2026 and 2027, but assumed the war would end in 2026. Ukrainian Finance Minister Sergii Marchenko has called the 2027 budget the most complicated since the full-scale invasion and urged donors to fill a $78 billion (€70 billion) gap. The Commission plans to provide €45 billion under the loan next year.
Economy Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis acknowledged a "sizeable funding gap" for 2027 and said the EU was assessing other options. A group of countries wants to revive the use of immobilised Russian assets, but Belgium, which holds most of them, has pushed back, and France and Italy are reluctant. New joint borrowing is politically unattractive, while larger national contributions would fall mainly on Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries. Brussels is pressing the UK, Canada and Japan to contribute more.
The backdrop is an escalation of Russian strikes: more than 30 people were reportedly killed in Kramatorsk when a glide bomb hit two buses, and Kyiv was plunged into darkness on Thursday. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the attacks war crimes. Ukraine is on the agenda of EU foreign ministers on Monday and of the EU summit in Brussels on Oct. 15–16.