Summit divided on idea of loan secured against Russian assets, as Belgium seeks guarantees if scheme goes wrong
EU leaders are racing to secure a funding deal for Ukraine that has been cast as a choice between “money today or blood tomorrow”, but Belgium continues to oppose a loan secured against Russia’s frozen assets.
At a summit billed as make or break, EU leaders are discussing an unprecedented move to tap some of Russia’s €210bn sovereign assets frozen in the bloc days after the full-scale invasion of 2022.
Under the scheme, the EU would provide Kyiv with a €90bn loan to help keep Ukraine in the fight, as Russia ekes out gains on the battlefields.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said leaders had a simple choice: “Either money today or blood tomorrow.”
Starving the supply to Ukraine wouldn’t stop this war. It would only allow Russia to take over more of Ukraine and kill more people. A steady and resolute supply of arms and other resources to Ukraine would allow Ukraine to make Russia’s efforts clearly useless and that would encourage Russia to stop - and that’s the only path to peace.
The tens of billions squandered on an ill-managed war would have been far better spent on refugee services and industrial development in the surrounded Eastern European block to absorb displaced peoples.
Rather than aiding actual Ukrainians and fortifying the NATO block against further Russian aggression, Europeans have pissed away a meager military surplus trying to bleed Russia into defeat. Meanwhile, the 7.7m displaced Ukrainians face joblessness, homelessness, poverty and a multitude of legal hurdles and sanctions that prevent them from resettlement.
If Europeans actually gave a shit about “Ukraine” the population rather than “Ukraine” the physical territory, we wouldn’t see Polish political leaders denying Ukrainian expats civil rights
This is a bald-faced lie. Arms into Ukraine didn’t help the country in 2018 when Trump championed it. It failed to grant Ukraine the ability to retake the Donbas, much less Crimea, even when Putin’s own mercenary company turned on him.
And that’s what this fight is supposed to be about. Zelensky’s government wants the Donbas back. Putin is refusing. And now we’re asking… how many more Ukrainians to die over a real estate negotiation? 10k? 50k? Another 100k?
We’re already talking about a war that’s killed roughly 400k Ukrainians and displaced a full quarter of the country’s 44M population. And we want to keep this up until when exactly? Until Russia stops existing? Until we get a more favorable territory settlement? Until the next US Presidential Election?
This is the same stupid shit we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vietnam and Korea, too. An endless war against an Ontologically Evil enemy that fuels a massive market bubble for the MIC and still ends in dismal failure.
You miss the point. It’s the steady support of Ukraine that would cause Russia to turn back one way or another. Yes, I’d prefer we support Ukraine more and allow them to take back their land. But the risk with that is that Russia (somewhat legitimately) then could fear Ukraine would keep going. And so they could use that as an excuse to escalate (general mobilization, tactical nukes). Conversly, letting Russia win only would encourage their expansionism further and we’d have to fight the same fight elsewhere. So we support Ukraine until Russia realizes their offensive gets them nowhere - they are just hurting themselves. This is starting to happen now, but it’s a long process. Our problem now is that the U.S. has been wishy washy and making it sound like they might stop supporting Ukraine and letting Russia take more land for good. So of course Putin will grasp for that outcome and keep things going with that chance on the table. It’s probably the only way he gets out of this without getting defenestrated. If trump and the gop hadn’t been such idiots, and just held the line, Russians would see no possibly advantageous end game and putin would probably be in exile or hung by his balls in red square by now. I think we’ll get there eventually, but it will just take longer with the orange moron in play.
Has it worked in the last twelve years? NATO has been fully in support of Ukraine since Maiden. Nothing has improved as a result.
Dems lost the general election in 2024 because they were more interested in bailing out Ukraine than covering domestic priorities.
These people have made their own bed.
Dems lost the election for many reasons. Supporting Ukraine was definitely not one of them tho. Support for supporting Ukraine remains strong in the U.S. despite all the Russian attempts at manipulating the media. Russian bribery and blackmail only works on politicians, most of the people can still see what must be done.
They shed 12M votes between 2020 and 2024, in large part thanks to failing to deliver on promises to their constituents. While Biden was throwing up his hands and insisting he couldn’t afford to relieve student debt, extend health care subsidies at the tail end of COVID, or defend the civil and labor rights of his constituents, he was shoveling money out the back door for Israel and Ukraine.
They work just fine on American business interests. But then American businesses are perfectly happy to bribe people directly. You had Elon promising to cut $1M checks to GOTV in swing states and TPUSA dropping much of its $85M war-chest across the critical swing state of Arizona in the run up to the election. Both groups pulled their fortunes from the post-COVID asset inflation of the American plutocracy. And they spent the money to buy up voters that Biden had allowed to languish.