Shock: The veto came from the person no one expected; "This is chaos"

He effectively blocked the EU’s plans to use frozen Russian assets and to release a €140 billion loan for Ukraine, which would have helped finance Kyiv over the next two years.

His opposition to the plan is based on fears that Vladimir Putin might retaliate against Belgium, where the assets are located.

This means that EU officials now have to return to the question of how to support Ukraine in the absence of these funds.

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“This is chaos. It shouldn’t have unfolded this way,” a diplomat told Politico.

Belgium’s opposition surprised EU diplomats and ministers, as well as senior officials working for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whose team had been saying for days that a solution had been found.

European Council President António Costa informed the Ukrainian president that a decision would be made today to fund Ukraine’s needs for the next two years, sending a strong message to Russia.

Before discussions on frozen Russian assets went awry, there was a positive atmosphere among Ukraine’s allies: the 19th package of sanctions against Russia was adopted, targeting Putin’s shadow tanker fleet as well as the banking and energy sectors.

For the first time, measures against Moscow were also implemented by Donald Trump, who imposed major sanctions on Russia’s largest oil companies.

He ran out of patience after months of talks with Putin, which he said were going nowhere.

At the start of yesterday’s summit, senior European officials were enthusiastic about Trump’s move.

“It was a week of ups and downs, but at the moment we are in a fairly good position,” one of them said.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was absent from most of the meeting and did not participate in discussions on Ukraine. He does not believe Europe should fight someone else’s war, but recently he has also taken the stance that he no longer wants to clash excessively with the EU.

French President Emmanuel Macron said that the proposal to use frozen Russian assets as a loan to Kyiv is not being abandoned. “The plan is not buried; we could discuss technical details. We must proceed methodically because we cannot do anything that violates international law,” Macron said, while von der Leyen insists that the EU will remain a steadfast ally of Kyiv.