EU fails to approve €500 mln from fund helping Ukraine with ammunition – Borrell

EU foreign ministers failed to reach an agreement on the eighth military aid tranche worth €500 million from the European Peace Fund to finance Ukraine's military needs during an informal meeting in Spain's Toledo.

Hungary keeps blocking EU attempts to bolster Ukraine's counteroffensive, says EU top diplomat Josep Borrell.

Borrell noted that at the meeting on 31 August, EU member states discussed his proposal to allocate €20 billion to finance military assistance to Ukraine under the European Peace Fund for the next four years.

I regret to say that the eighth tranche of the European Peace Fund is still blocked, and I hope that we will be able to unblock it in the coming weeks. But this is a problem that is still being addressed, Borrell said.

EU supports Ukraine's efforts to find a just peace, and today, the ministers discussed non-military aspects of this process, mainly financial.

Previously, Josep Borrell proposed to increase the number of Ukrainian soldiers trained by the EU training mission to 40,000.

Borrell said initially, the task was to train 25,000 Ukrainian soldiers, and at the end of October, this figure will be 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

He also elaborated on the issue of providing Ukraine with ammunition, recalling a three-track approach to resolving this issue: providing Ukraine with ammunition from existing stocks, which was implemented by the end of May, jointly purchasing ammunition from the European defense industry and increasing the production capacity of the military-industrial complex.