EU loan aims to keep Ukraine war going until 2029

Viktor Orban’s “democratic ouster” is expected to remove Hungary’s procedural opposition to the EU’s planned 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine, to be financed by members raising common debt.

State-run RT published a detailed article about this plan last December, which represented a compromise for financing the loan after the bloc failed to reach consensus either to outright confiscate some of Russia’s frozen assets to give to Ukraine or use at least some of them as collateral for a loan.

If everything goes according to plan — and Bloomberg reported that the bloc intends to move swiftly after Hungary held up the process for several months — this move risks funding a forever war.

Hopes of a military breakthrough along the front or a diplomatic breakthrough in US-mediated talks have yet to materialize, so Russia’s on-the-ground advance remains glacial, meaning it could take years to achieve Russia’s reported minimum goal of obtaining control over all of the Donbas.

Funding two-thirds of the Ukrainian budget for the next two years, per the EU’s stated goal, would likely lead to another two-year round being agreed to encourage the US to continue its military aid.

Since last summer, the US no longer donates arms to Ukraine but instead sells them to NATO, which then transfers them there. Even if US President Donald Trump suspends these sales, so long as the Ukrainian budget is financed and nothing major changes, Ukraine might hold out long enough for him to change his mind again.

To be sure, Ukraine cannot fight indefinitely. Even President Volodymyr Zelensky’s new Chief of Staff Kyrylo Budanov recently acknowledged that it faces “a huge, huge problem,” after new Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said that more than 2 million Ukrainians are dodging the draft, seriously complicating operations at the front.

There is also the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin will convert the “special military operation” into a formal war, in which he would no longer avoid civilian casualties in an attempt to end the conflict decisively on Russia’s terms.

Two competing schools of thought exist regarding why he has not yet done so. One holds that he does not want to inadvertently risk escalation with the US that could spiral into World War III.

Another suggests he still genuinely considers Russians and Ukrainians to be one people, as he argued at length in a summer 2021 essay, and is therefore reluctant to see their civilians suffer.

In any case, the forever war scenario assumes Putin will not take that step — an assumption that cannot be taken for granted.

Nevertheless, the EU operates under the assumption that he will not, which explains why it plans to move swiftly to approve Ukraine’s 90 billion euro loan and continues to buy arms from the US for transfer to Ukraine.

This not only perpetuates the risk that tensions will spiral out of control but also deepens the EU’s energy insecurity amid the ongoing crisis caused by the Iran war, since an end to the conflict could hypothetically result in the resumption of Russian energy exports to the EU, to the benefit of its citizens.

The EU’s unstated goal appears to be prolonging the conflict until at least 2029 in the hope that Democrats will regain the White House and resume the US’s Biden-era Ukraine policy.

Even though Europeans will suffer economically in the interim — not to mention the deaths of more Russians and Ukrainians — the bloc appears willing to pay these costs in pursuit of its ideologically driven goal of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia. Ultimately, however, the conflict may end up strategically defeating the EU instead.