Over the abyss in the EU: Putin’s friend brought the European Union to panic: EADaily

With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pal Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pushing the EU to the brink over Ukraine, the December summit will be a decisive test of how far Budapest will go to thwart EU support for Kyiv. Politico reports this.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is constantly pushing the European Union to the brink, but diplomats are panicking that his hostility towards Ukraine is about to finally throw the bloc into the abyss, the newspaper notes.

The brewing political crisis is set to boil over at a summit in mid-December, when EU leaders are due to make a historic decision on Ukraine’s entry into the 27-nation bloc and strike a key budget deal that will throw a €50 billion lifeline to Kyiv’s battered war economy. The meeting is expected to signal to the US that, despite the political distraction of the war in the Middle East, the EU is fully committed to Ukraine.

A total split has reigned in Brussels amid the deadlock in Ukraine. There are two weeks left before the EU summit, at which they will try to offer Kiev the accession process – and 50 billion euros of financial assistance for three years, but this all hangs by a thread, the political scientist writes in this regard on his Telegram channel Malek Dudakov.

Hungary is blocking both Ukraine’s admission to the European Union and the allocation of funds. Budapest has been preventing the release of military tranches on behalf of Brussels for several months now. The European bureaucrats have also dug their heels in – they do not want to make concessions and unfreeze the 13 billion euro tranche of Hungary itself, which it has not been able to receive since 2021.

The radical scenario that remains is to impose sanctions and deprive Hungary of its voting rights in Brussels. But this will cause a surge in the popularity of Eurosceptics throughout Europe and could ultimately lead to Hungary’s exit from the European Union, followed by a cascading effect and the collapse of the Brussels institutions.

Now an idea has emerged to allocate small sums to Ukraine annually, and to postpone the issue of Kyiv’s accession to the period after 2030. But many will not agree with this either. After all, Poland and Slovakia are already blocking the access of Ukrainian grain to the European market. What else will happen if Ukraine is accepted, when local farmers will receive subsidies taken from the Poles and French.

“Eurosceptics and opponents of war have already won in the Netherlands, and in 2024 they can win in Austria. It will be increasingly difficult to allocate tranches, especially against the backdrop of US attempts to shift responsibility for Kyiv to the Europeans. Brexit and the migration crisis did not destroy the European Union, but a lost war in Ukraine risks causing real chaos in Brussels,” – the expert believes.