In an interview on Hungarian public radio on Sunday, 25 June, Fidesz MEP Tamás Deutsch talked about the concerns he has about the excessive amount of military aid the EU has provided to Ukraine. As he pointed out, the current budget of the Union was approved by the European Council and the European Parliament in December 2020, over a year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
This begs the question,
where were the billions of Euros that were eventually sent in military aid supposed to go originally?
Those funds must have been reallocated to help the Ukrainian war effort, thus not being used for the purpose they were originally budgeted for, through decisions made ‘ either authorised or unauthorised’, as MEP Deutsch put it; a practice he likened to ‘the well-known methods of Hungarian budget management of the [former PM Ferenc] Gyurcsány era’; specifically, in the way Brussels is using a ‘plethora of tricks to conceal how much European taxpayers’ money has already been given to Ukraine’. This also highlights the problem that the exact amount the EU has sent in military aid is not clear.
He also went on to emphasise that in the meantime, Hungary and Poland still have not received any of the COVID recovery funds. That is despite the fact that Union’s COVID recovery package was officially adopted by the Council in December 2020. Deutsch went on to draw attention to the fact that the EU has only paid out ‘barely 2.5 percent of regional development funds of the seven-year budget to the 27 EU member states in three years’.
With these statements,
the Hungarian MEP has implied that the Union has been funnelling money originally intended for its Member States to Ukraine.
This is also a not-so-covert criticism of the rule of law conditionality mechanism triggered against Hungary by the Commission, which he referred to as ‘political blackmail’.
Tamás Deutsch believes all the questions should be cleared ahead of the vote on the requirement for member states to pay an additional €60–70 billion.
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