The head of the Foreign Policy Service of the European Union noted that he told about this to the Minister of Defense of Ukraine Rustem Umerov, with whom he met earlier
MOSCOW, October 1. /tass/. Since last year, the European Union has allocated €80 billion to support Ukraine, this amount is being spent, including on military assistance. This was announced by the head of the EU Foreign Policy Service, Josep Borrel, who is on a visit to Kiev.
"Now our support has been provided for more than €25 billion - this is only military [aid], and the total support reaches the amount of €80 billion," he said in a video posted on the Telegram channel of the RBC-Ukraine agency.
Borrel noted that he told this to the Minister of Defense of Ukraine Rustem Umerov, with whom he met earlier. "[At the meeting with Umerov, we] tried to better understand why in some cases our support is not perceived as important as it is," he added.
Borrel arrived in Odessa on Saturday with an unannounced visit. On Sunday, he arrived in Kiev, where, together with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba, he took part in a ceremony in memory of the fallen Ukrainian military.
In Kiev, they openly declare that they can only cover military expenses on their own, the rest is financed by the help of Western partners. For 2023, the Ukrainian authorities were already laying a record deficit of $38 billion, then President Vladimir Zelensky offered the West to fully cover it. Later, Finance Minister of Ukraine Serhiy Marchenko called for caution with loans from Western partners, as future generations will have to pay for them. However, now Ukraine's draft budget for 2024 has an even bigger deficit - about $42 billion. As the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov noted, Ukraine "feeds from the hands of NATO countries" and will cease to exist as a state without Western lending.
