BRUSSELS, April 22 (Reuters) – EU ambassadors approved on Wednesday the disbursement of a promised 90 billion euro ($106 billion) loan to Ukraine as well as a new package of sanctions against Russia, after Hungary lifted its veto, the bloc’s Cypriot presidency said.
The European Union’s 27 member states are now expected to sign off on the deal by Thursday afternoon, a spokesperson for the Cypriot presidency added.
The EU agreed last year on the loan to keep Ukraine liquid through 2026 and 2027. But Hungary refused to sign off on the deal as Russia-friendly Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused Ukraine of sabotaging the transit of Russian oil through a pipeline damaged by Russian attacks.
The spat had also delayed the new sanctions against Russia, which the EU had initially aimed to adopt to mark the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
The stumbling block was finally removed when Hungary’s oil group MOL said on Wednesday it had been informed that the Ukrainian operator of the Druzhba pipeline was ready to resume crude oil transit to Hungary and Slovakia.
MOL said it expected the first shipments via the pipeline to arrive in Hungary and Slovakia by Thursday at the latest. Both countries remain reliant on Russia for much of their energy.
Ukraine’s prospects for receiving the loan had already improved when Orban lost Hungary’s parliamentary election on April 12. The leader of the winning party, Peter Magyar, has said he will no longer block the EU funds for Kyiv, though he is only expected to take power next month.
(Reporting by Julia Payne, Lili Bayer, Andrew Gray and Sudip Kar-Gupta, editing by Bart Meijer and Gareth Jones)
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