Fico and Orbán Do Not Completely Reject Support for Ukraine – Bulgarian PM

The Prime Ministers of Hungary and Slovakia had not completely rejected the possibility of providing aid to Ukraine, but they had reservations about it at the meeting of EU leaders in Brussels on 26 October.

Nikolai Denkov, Bulgarian Prime Minister, was asked after arriving at the second day of the summit in Brussels how the discussion of further EU support for Ukraine went in the context of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico publicly expressing their objections.

"Neither of them rejected the possibility of providing aid to Ukraine – even in the long term. The question is what types of aid and how it is used, how the European Union can be sure it is used effectively. That was the discussion yesterday," Denkov said.

Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said that at the summit of EU leaders on Thursday, other countries called on the leaders of Hungary and Slovakia, who do not want to extend military support for Ukraine, to think about the consequences of their suggestions.

Before leaving for the summit, Fico said that he did not want to support sanctions against Russia without assessing their impact on individual EU countries and would not support aid to Ukraine with weapons.

Orbán said that he did not plan to apologise for his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin; on the contrary, he was "proud" of Hungary's strategy, which he considered "peace-making".