Summit divided on idea of loan secured against Russian assets, as Belgium seeks guarantees if scheme goes wrong
EU leaders are racing to secure a funding deal for Ukraine that has been cast as a choice between “money today or blood tomorrow”, but Belgium continues to oppose a loan secured against Russia’s frozen assets.
At a summit billed as make or break, EU leaders are discussing an unprecedented move to tap some of Russia’s €210bn sovereign assets frozen in the bloc days after the full-scale invasion of 2022.
Under the scheme, the EU would provide Kyiv with a €90bn loan to help keep Ukraine in the fight, as Russia ekes out gains on the battlefields.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said leaders had a simple choice: “Either money today or blood tomorrow.”
How do folks like you exist? I don’t want violence but to act like it doesn’t have a place in our world? That’s just…silly.
You’re act like folks who are being invaded by murderers and rapists are the bad ones for defending themselves? And asking their allies for help is wrong?
That’d be like being mad at me for using violence to stop someone from hurting my partner and mother of our child. What you except me to tell them “No, stop that.”
Like what. You’re lame as hell.
It’s entirely insincere to pretend more arms to Ukraine will result in less bloodshed. At best, you can argue “at least the right people will die” assuming you squint and tacitly ignore all the conscripts and mercenaries and civilians involved in this conflict.
But it’s insane to pretend we’re heading towards an end to violence doing exactly what NATO has been doing for the last three years.
I don’t think anyone expects there to be less bloodshed or an end to violence. Yes, I do quite honestly want “the right people” to be the ones to die in this war. Are random Russian conscripts at fault for this? No. Are they in someone else’s country, with guns? Yes.
The Ukrainians owe Russia nothing, and pretending that if we tie their hands and hamstring them and make them less effective that this is a BETTER outcome because there is “less bloodshed” is a fiction. One that I think you are all too aware of.
Where are the calls for Russia to lay down arms and retreat? Russia are the only ones who can end this war tomorrow. I will continue to support getting Ukraine to tomorrow, until they do
That’s right there in the headline. “Money today or blood tomorrow”
Brother, its all over the EU. But its a hard sell for a country that’s gaining territory in the face of a fracturing and deteriorating coalition of (increasingly il)liberal western states.
It’s neutral, without the money more Ukranians will die, with the money more Russians will. We don’t know how or when the war will end so it’s impossible to know whether the total deaths will be greater or smaller with a better funded Ukraine.
It’s just a matter of taking sides. And I know what side I’m on.
Sure, I can feel bad for the Russian kid drafted into this. But Mercs? Come on now. Guys hired to kill…I’m supposed to shed a tear over them?
And yes, more arms would help stop the bloodshed of Ukraine because they’d be able to defend themselves more.
At the end of the day, Ukraine is the victim in this war, and you are blaming them for fighting back.
The only benefit to beliefs like yours would be that we wouldn’t be going through all this hoopla into fascism and the world we be goose stepping everywhere we go. I’d rather die bloody and beaten than to be on my belly groveling for mercy.
You’ve got a lot of folks drafted into this conflict on false pretexts. Others are being lured in the face of collapsing economies at home.
Men are fighting on the frontline of a war they have no stake in, with weapons they have little training to wield. Sky News examines how South Africans are being tricked into joining Russians on the frontline in Ukraine.
Thousands of South American soldiers head to Ukraine front line looking for better pay
This war is exploiting the poor and the “undesirables” on a global scale.
Ukraine isn’t a person. And the persistent belief that real estate is people is so fucking Libertarian it chills the soul.
There are plenty of Ukrainian natives victimized by the conflict, both through the violence inflicted by invading Russians and the callous ineptitude of the reining Ukrainian leadership. Now that much of the adult male population of the country has been exhausted as cannon fodder, both countries are drawing in surplus males from the international community.
Starving the beast of conflict should be the goal of the international community, not fanning the flames. But because so many of these countries see this conflict as a profit center, and surplus men in their own countries as a threat, we’ve created a real economic incentive to fund the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians and the internationally unemployed on one budget line.
You’d rather live a righteous lie than recognize the bitter truth? This isn’t a matter of benefit, its a matter of dispensing with delusions. This conflict is not about reconquering the Donbas from an Evil Enemy. It is about war-profiteering and refugee disposal.
Starving the supply to Ukraine wouldn’t stop this war. It would only allow Russia to take over more of Ukraine and kill more people. A steady and resolute supply of arms and other resources to Ukraine would allow Ukraine to make Russia’s efforts clearly useless and that would encourage Russia to stop - and that’s the only path to peace.
The tens of billions squandered on an ill-managed war would have been far better spent on refugee services and industrial development in the surrounded Eastern European block to absorb displaced peoples.
Rather than aiding actual Ukrainians and fortifying the NATO block against further Russian aggression, Europeans have pissed away a meager military surplus trying to bleed Russia into defeat. Meanwhile, the 7.7m displaced Ukrainians face joblessness, homelessness, poverty and a multitude of legal hurdles and sanctions that prevent them from resettlement.
If Europeans actually gave a shit about “Ukraine” the population rather than “Ukraine” the physical territory, we wouldn’t see Polish political leaders denying Ukrainian expats civil rights
This is a bald-faced lie. Arms into Ukraine didn’t help the country in 2018 when Trump championed it. It failed to grant Ukraine the ability to retake the Donbas, much less Crimea, even when Putin’s own mercenary company turned on him.
And that’s what this fight is supposed to be about. Zelensky’s government wants the Donbas back. Putin is refusing. And now we’re asking… how many more Ukrainians to die over a real estate negotiation? 10k? 50k? Another 100k?
We’re already talking about a war that’s killed roughly 400k Ukrainians and displaced a full quarter of the country’s 44M population. And we want to keep this up until when exactly? Until Russia stops existing? Until we get a more favorable territory settlement? Until the next US Presidential Election?
This is the same stupid shit we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vietnam and Korea, too. An endless war against an Ontologically Evil enemy that fuels a massive market bubble for the MIC and still ends in dismal failure.