Finance Minister Fernando Medina announced on Tuesday Portugal’s support for European financing of Ukraine’s needs to keep the state running during the war. Medina was speaking at the end of the Ecofin meeting in Brussels, where the issue was being debated.
The minister described as “very broad convergence”, among the 27 for financing around the bet that the European Commission will formalize this Wednesday. Fernando Medina revealed, however, that during the discussion it became clear that the measure does not receive the support of all.
“There is a country that expressed doubts about the progress of this proposal, which is Hungary, which expressed its reservations about the approval of a common financing instrument,” revealed the official, still putting the result of the discussion in perspective.
Medina considers that the position of the Hungarian Government “refers us to another debate that has to do with Hungary’s own access to the financing of the Recovery and Resilience Plan”.
“A debate that we know,” he commented in reference to the dispute with Brussels, which conditions access to funds to compliance with the rule of law.
Brussels plans to deliver an amount of 3,000 million euros per month to Ukraine over the next year, for a total amount of 18,000 million euros. “What is more important than the total value, [é que] this funding covers Ukraine’s financial needs for a year”, the minister stressed, considering that “this is very important in a context of great difficulty”, in which it is necessary to maintain “minimally operational structures, in a context of war , [para o] functioning of the Ukrainian state in a context of war and in a context of extreme difficulty”,
Medina believes that it will be “a solid solution from the point of view of the financial capacities of the different Member States”, which will have to bear the weight of the loans that Brussels will contract to finance Ukraine.
“The Commission’s proposal is a strong proposal, it is also a very balanced proposal from the point of view of the way it is designed, from the point of view of the burdens that each Member State will have to bear and that is why Portugal is in the vast group of countries that supports this Commission proposal and we hope that it will see the light of day soon”, revealed the minister.
The president of the European Commission announced this Sunday to the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, the architecture of the proposal that will be announced this Wednesday, with which the European Union is expected to cover the financing needs of the State throughout 2023.
Source: TSF
