With Spring Initiative, European Loan, Score Is Advantage Ukraine

Without the loan, Ukraine would have struggled to maintain its now-phenomenal output of drones, robotic vehicles and missiles, just as Russia would have struggled to maintain its own output of war materials without the big rise in oil prices that has resulted from Donald Trump's war on Iran. Each side is, naturally, doing what it can to attack the other side's weapons factories while Ukraine is also attacking Russia's oil refineries and export facilities.

Reuters has reported that attacks by Ukraine's drones succeeded in temporarily reducing Russia's oil-export capacity by 40% during March. What has changed is not the fact of these attacks but rather that Ukraine can now make them in repeated waves, hitting the same port, pipeline or refinery in new attacks over several days, worsening the damage and slowing the repair process.

Last week a drone attack on an oil refinery at Tuapse on Russia's Black Sea coast produced especially dramatic consequences, as smoke and other pollution covered the whole city for several days.

This sustained air campaign is now possible thanks to the expansion of drone production inside Ukraine and in partner factories in countries such as Denmark, but also Ukraine's impressive pace of technological innovation. This is enabling its drones to hit targets farther away and to have a higher chance of evading Russian defenses.

At the same time, Ukraine is using more armed robotic vehicles on the battlefield to prevent Russian advances and even to regain some territory, reducing Ukraine's own casualty rate while aiming at keeping Russia's casualty rate higher than the rate at which it can recruit new soldiers. For all that production and innovation, funding is required.

Although the European Council did not devote much time to the question of funding Ukraine at this week's meeting, it will need to start thinking about it again soon as the €90 billion loan covers just two years.

As the EU found last year, there are formidable legal and political obstacles to using the most obvious source of funds, the roughly €300 billion of frozen Russian central bank assets that are currently held mainly in Belgium. That is why in December the European Council resorted instead to borrowing €90 billion itself and lending the money on to Ukraine.

The defeat of Orbán in this month's Hungarian election removes one of the political obstacles to future funding, but not all. Slovakia and the newly elected governments of Slovenia and Bulgaria are also quite pro-Putin, albeit not as aggressively obstructive as Orbán was. But the big question concerns what will happen in the French elections in April next year.

Orbán's fall did not represent a public rejection of populism nor of right-wing policies on immigration nor even of hostility to Ukraine. The man who beat Orbán is also right-wing and has expressed skepticism about support for Ukraine even though he is not an active supporter of Putin. Magyar's landslide reflected discontent at the failure of the incumbent, Orbán, to raise living standards after 16 years in power, at his authoritarian style and at the spread of corruption.

When Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement Nationale tries next year to turn its current opinion poll lead into victory in France's presidential election, it will be campaigning against an existing political system which it can describe as having failed to raise French living standards.