EU unlocks €6.6bn for Ukraine’s defence after a three-year veto

What happened

On September 25, the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced that member states had agreed on the terms for releasing €6.6 billion from the European Peace Facility (EPF) for Ukraine. “That’s good news for Ukraine and bad news for Russia,” she wrote on X.

According to Euronews, the political agreement was reached at a meeting of the Political and Security Committee in Brussels.

Where the money goes

The package is split three ways:

• €4.7 billion to reimburse member states for weapons and equipment they have already sent to Ukraine;
• €1 billion for new joint procurement of defence equipment;
• €900 million for the EU Military Assistance Mission for Ukraine (EUMAM Ukraine), which trains Ukrainian soldiers in EU countries.

Kallas said some countries have already announced they will channel their reimbursements straight into further support for Ukraine. The Kyiv Independent names Germany and Sweden among them.

Why the money was stuck

The EPF is an off-budget EU instrument set up in March 2021 and funded by member states in proportion to their GDP. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, the EU used it for the first time in its history to supply lethal weapons to a third country under attack. The Kyiv Independent calculates that the fund has provided Ukraine with €11.1 billion in support since 2022.

In May 2023, however, Hungary under then prime minister Viktor Orbán vetoed the reimbursement mechanism. As Euronews explains, Budapest objected to Kyiv placing Hungary’s OTP Bank on its list of “international sponsors of war”. The list was scrapped in 2024, but the veto stayed. The deadlock broke only after Orbán lost the April election and Péter Magyar became prime minister. The Kyiv Independent adds that Orbán’s court case over the issue was dismissed on September 9. Even then, EU capitals still had to agree how much each should be reimbursed and whether the money should instead be rolled into new aid.

A message to Moscow

Kallas linked the decision to Russia’s hybrid campaign in Europe. “Moscow’s hybrid attacks try to intimidate Europe into scaling back its support for Ukraine. Europe is doing the opposite,” she said.

Why it matters now

The news comes at a difficult moment for Kyiv. Euronews points out that Ukraine’s defence ministry faces a shortfall of about $27 billion, and on the same day President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that the gap must be closed in October–November to pay for drones due in the first months of 2027. The EPF money is not designed to plug that gap directly, since most of it reimburses EU states. But €1 billion for joint procurement, plus the reimbursements some countries plan to pass on to Ukraine, is extra support at a moment when it is badly needed.

What next

Several legal acts still have to be adopted before the money is actually paid out, Euronews reports. EU defence ministers meet in Brussels on September 28, where, according to The Kyiv Independent, more governments could pledge their reimbursements to Ukraine. Kallas has also repeatedly called for EUMAM training to take place inside Ukraine and may raise the idea again.