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EU leaders have struck a deal to lend €90bn to Ukraine, borrowed against the bloc’s shared budget, after a proposal to use immobilised Russian sovereign assets collapsed.
The financial agreement represents a critical lifeline for Ukraine, and comes as Europe seeks to assert its right to influence US-led peace talks to end Russia’s almost four-year long war against Kyiv.
“We committed, we delivered,” European Council president António Costa said after the summit of EU leaders agreed the loan.
EU capitals have for months wrestled over using €210bn of cash belonging to Russia, most of which is held in Belgium, to back a so-called reparations loan for Kyiv.
Belgium had demanded expansive guarantees to cover any financial risk from the loan, which led other leaders to reject those terms, according to officials briefed on the discussions.
Ukraine has warned that it faces collapse in early 2026 without additional support. EU leaders had pledged not to leave the summit in Brussels without agreeing some form of financial aid.
“The absence of a decision would have been a disaster,” said French President Emmanuel Macron after the summit.
After more than 16 hours of discussions among EU leaders, they agreed in the early hours of Friday to raise a loan of €90bn on capital markets, secured against untapped spending in the bloc’s shared budget, to fund Ukraine for the next two years.
Ukraine will only have to pay back the loan after Russia has paid reparations. Russia’s assets would remain immobilised and could ultimately be used to repay the loan if Moscow does not pay reparations, Costa said.
The agreement to borrow against EU taxpayer funds rather than Russia’s cash is a political blow to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who had championed the reparations loans and sought to pressure Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever to lift his objections.
“Europe has won and financial stability has certainly won,” said De Wever. “We avoided chaos, we avoided division.”
Merz described the outcome as “a very practical, good solution that in its impact is just like the solution that we had long discussed, but was clearly just too complicated”.
He stressed that Ukraine would “only have to repay this loan if it is compensated by Russia”.
“We always said that this was about getting Kyiv the money,” said one EU official involved in the negotiations. “Not about how.”
Belgium demanded “uncapped” risk sharing from EU countries against litigation and retaliation risks from Russia, according to an earlier proposal discussed by the leaders, who collectively decided that they could not agree to that maximalist approach.
France and Italy led calls for an alternative proposal using the bloc’s shared budget, the officials added.
The €90bn loan plan agreed at the summit would “not have any financial obligations of Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia”, the leaders agreed.
Those three countries had previously said they would not support using EU cash to fund Ukraine.
“They don’t have to pay — but we will make them pay for it [politically],” said a senior European official.
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