Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, poses for a picture with a service member at a position near the frontline in the Donetsk region. Photograph: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters
Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, poses for a picture with a service member at a position near the frontline in the Donetsk region. Photograph: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters
EU officials vow support despite Hungary's veto of Ukrainian aid
Jennifer Rankin
Senior EU officials have vowed to ensure Ukraine gets €18bn in financial aid, after Hungary vetoed the release of the funds.
The European Commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis told reporters that the EU must keep its promises to Ukraine.
He said:
Ukraine is a country at war. It desperately needs our support and we just cannot allow one member state to derail or delay this financial support.
Earlier Viktor Orbán’s government was accused of “holding hostage” funds for Ukrainian hospitals and “cynical obstructionism” after Hungary confirmed on Tuesday that it would block €18bn of aid for Ukraine.
The EU has promised to underwrite €18bn in cheap loans to Kyiv to keep Ukraine’s government afloat in 2023. The EU’s 26 other member states will now study how to move ahead without Hungary, although hope Budapest can be persuaded to change its mind.
Hungary, which has angered other member states with its sharp criticism of EU sanctions against Russia, may now find it harder to unlock EU funds.
The Czech finance minister, Zbyněk Stanjura, who chaired the meeting, said Budapest’s decision on €18bn for Ukraine would be considered alongside EU member state approval of Hungary’s coronavirus recovery plan.
He added:
The money will go to Ukraine: either it will be 27 or 26 member states that take part. We have to be able to send the money to Ukraine.
The Green MEP Daniel Freund, a persistent critic of Hungary’s government, accused Orbán of abusing the veto like no one ever before. He said:
He even takes funds for Ukrainian hospitals hostage for this … The EU will find ways to support Ukraine even without Hungary. But that means: more time, more effort, more costs. Viktor Orbán could not have given Putin a nicer present today.
The centre-right Romanian MEP Siegfried Mureşan said the Hungarian veto was disappointing, adding:
It is hard to regard this as anything other than cynical obstructionism.
An American national who was arrested by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in July has been released and is residing without documents in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk.
Suedi Murekezi, 35, was detained on 10 June by Russian occupying forces in the Ukrainian city of Kherson, where he had been living for more than three years.
After spending more than four months in different prisons and basements in Russian-occupied Ukraine, he told the Guardian on Monday that he had been released by the Moscow-backed Donetsk separatists on 28 October.
Murekezi said he had been unable to leave Donetsk because he does not have any identity papers.
A Ukrainian presidential adviser has said that Iran has so far not delivered ballistic missiles to Russia and may not do so, as a result of diplomatic pressure and Iran’s own internal political turmoil.
Mikhailo Podolyak told the Guardian that Russian forces currently had enough of its own cruise missiles in its stockpile for “two or three” more mass strikes against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure like the salvo fired on Monday.
Russia has sought to replenish its arsenal with an offer to buy Iranian missiles. The secretary of the security council, Nikolai Patrushev, visited Tehran in November and was reported to have had missiles on his shopping list. But Podolyak said the deal had not gone through yet.
“Iran has come under huge diplomatic pressure and the protests have also raised pressure on the government,” he told the Guardian in his Kyiv office. “The government is starting to lose its grip on Iranian society and their inner domestic problems are growing. That’s why they just don’t have time for dealing with Russia. It’s not their priority.”
Podolyak said he believed talks were still under way between Moscow and Tehran on missiles, and that as part of its bargaining position the Russian government had offered its own “cut-throats”, referring to experts in crushing dissent, to suppress the nationwide anti-government protests.
“So the negotiations are ongoing, but as of today, no missiles have been transferred to Russia,” he said.
Podolyak said Ukrainian forces had become adept at defending against Russian missile attacks, claiming to have shot down an estimated 60 of 70 missiles fired on Monday.
He said the country, with foreign help, was also working towards making its power grid more resilient, redesigning it to make it easier for one region with access to power to help another that had been cut off.
Podolyak, a close aide to Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was also fiercely critical of remarks from Emmanuel Macron on Saturday, in which the French president suggested the west should offer Vladimir Putin security guarantees if he agreed to peace negotiations.
“It’s quite weird when you’re not trying to help the victim – and it’s very clear who’s the victim here – but you’re thinking of how to satisfy the murderer,” he said.
Strikes on Russian airbases of last 30 hours will complicate future bombing missions against Ukraine but effect is likely to be primarily psychological. "They [Russia] will have less confidence that anywhere is safe" - said an official, speaking on condition of anonymity
Iran has acknowledged that it had given Russia drones, but said they were sent before the war in Ukraine broke out.
The Guardian has seen evidence that at least some of the Iranian-made drones used by Russia in its war were probably supplied after Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February.
Hungary has vetoed an €18bn aid package for Ukraine, forcing the European Commission and EU countries to seek an alternative way to ensure aid can keep flowing to Kyiv in the new year.
The move by the Hungarian government has widely been seen as a way for its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to use his approval for Ukraine aid as leverage to secure his country’s share of EU recovery funds. The EU has sought to hold back some funds destined for Budapest because of rule-of-law breaches.
THIS is the sound of the Hungarian veto against financial aid for Ukraine:
"Hungary is not in favor of the amendment of the financial regulation."
The commission will now look at how to “provide the necessary solution to Ukraine already as of January”, the EU’s budget commissioner, Johannes Hahn, said during a public session of the bloc’s finance ministers.
Today’s Hungarian veto means decisions on other files on the finance ministers’ agenda – including a minimum corporate tax rate (which Budapest is also blocking), the Hungarian recovery plan and connected €5.8bn in grants, and the decision to freeze €7.5bn of EU funds for Hungary over corruption issues – were also postponed.
The Czech finance minister, Zbyněk Stanjura, said:
We were not able to adopt the package as a whole but we will not be discouraged. Our ambition remains that we will start disbursements to Ukraine in January.
He asked the council to work on “a solution supported by 26 member states”, which would get around Hungary’s veto.
The EU’s 27 nations have until 19 December to make a decision.
Ukrainian embassies have received more “bloody packages”, according to its foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, in what Kyiv has described as a “campaign of terror and intimidation”.
Over the past week, Ukraine said its diplomatic missions in countries across Europe had been targeted with packages soaked in liquid with a distinctive smell and containing animals’ eyes. Kuleba said Ukraine’s embassies in Romania and Denmark received such packages today.
As of Friday, Ukraine said 17 embassies had been targeted, indicating that another was delivered on Saturday. Ukraine’s foreign ministry said the packages had been delivered to its embassies in Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Croatia and Italy, to general consulates in Naples and Kraków, and the consulate in Brno in the Czech Republic.
On Monday, Spanish police said they had intercepted three more envelopes containing animal eyes addressed to Ukraine’s embassy in Madrid and its consulates in Barcelona and Málaga.
A Ukrainian embassy employee in Madrid was injured on Wednesday by a letter bomb, which was addressed to Ukraine’s ambassador to Spain. A further four letter bombs were sent on Wednesday to addresses in Spain, including to a Spanish arms manufacturer that has produced rockets donated to Ukraine, as well as Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the US embassy in Madrid.
In an interview with CNN on Friday, Kuleba described what followed the Madrid attack as “more weird” and “even sick”.
Asked who he thought was behind the packages, Kuleba said he “feels tempted to name Russia” as it benefits from sowing fear among Ukrainian diplomats. But he added that it could also be someone who sympathises with Russia, so he would await the findings of ongoing investigations.
A drone attack set an oil storage tank on fire at an airfield in Kursk, western Russia, 175 miles from the Ukrainian border.
The governor of the region, Roman Starovoyt, said there had been no casualties and that the fire was “localised”.
On Monday, Ukraine appeared to launch drone attacks on two military airfields deep inside Russian territory.
Kyiv has not directly taken responsibility for the attacks, but a senior Ukrainian official told the New York Times the drones involved on Monday were launched from Ukrainian territory.
Russia: drone attack sets oil storage tank alight on Kursk airfield – video
Ukraine’s presidential chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, has confirmed that Moscow and Kyiv exchanged 60 prisoners of war in the latest series of swaps.
Among those who were returned to Ukraine included dozens who had defended the besieged Azovstal steelworks in the port city of Mariupol, he said.
Another successful POWs swap. Symbolically, it took place on the Armed Forces Day. 60 people are coming home. Among them are army servicemen, the National and Border Guards. pic.twitter.com/EoNCEbTiht
The Russian state-owned bank VTB said it was hit by an “unprecedented cyber-attack from abroad”, which it said was the largest cyber-attack in its history.
In a statement, it said it was repelling the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and warned of temporary difficulties in accessing its mobile app and website.
The statement reads:
The bank’s technological infrastructure is under an unprecedented cyber attack from abroad. The largest not only this year, but in the whole time the bank has operated.
It added:
An analysis of the DDoS attack indicates that it was planned and large-scale, and its purpose has been to interfere with the operations of banking services, VTB indicates. The majority of requests for bank services during the attack have generated from foreign segments of the internet, though there has also been malicious traffic from Russian IP addresses.
