EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has said there is “new momentum” behind a €90 billion loan for Ukraine after the Hungarian elections, indicating that a positive decision could follow quickly if the remaining obstacle is removed.
The European Union may be close to breaking a long-running deadlock over a proposed €90 billion loan for Ukraine, after High Representative Kaja Kallas said a positive decision could come within the next 24 hours. Speaking after the Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg on 21 April, Kallas said there was “new momentum” following the Hungarian elections and expressed hope that the file could move forward without further delay. In the official EEAS press remarks, she said she expected “a positive decision on the €90 billion loan in the next 24 hours”.
The remarks matter because they suggest Brussels believes the political conditions may now be more favourable than they were only days ago. The proposed loan has been tied up by objections linked to the Druzhba pipeline and the concerns of Hungary and Slovakia over energy flows. In the same press conference exchange, Kallas said that Ukraine had made the necessary promise on the pipeline issue and that this “should not derail the decision”. She also acknowledged that the file had seen unexpected reversals before and stopped short of presenting an agreement as complete.
That caution is important. As of the material reviewed here, Kallas’s statement amounts to a strong signal of expectation rather than confirmation that the decision has already been taken. The wording from the EEAS transcript is precise: she said she expected an agreement in 24 hours and did not want to “jinx it”. That leaves the story in a narrow but significant category familiar in Brussels — a file that is politically unlocked in principle but not yet formally completed.
The broader context is the EU’s continuing effort to maintain both military and financial support for Kyiv while internal unanimity rules continue to complicate decision-making. In the same remarks, Kallas said ministers had also urged rapid progress on the 20th sanctions package, a review of other long-blocked decisions, and further movement on the European Peace Facility. She presented the loan issue as part of a wider push to remove accumulated blockages in the Union’s Ukraine policy. In that sense, the 21 April Foreign Affairs Council was not only about short-term military support, but about whether the EU can recover speed and coherence in its institutional response.
Kallas also used the press conference to stress that the EU remains Ukraine’s largest supporter and said the Union’s EUMAM training mission had now trained more than 90,000 Ukrainian soldiers. That placed the proposed loan within a broader argument: that support for Ukraine cannot be reduced to battlefield assistance alone and must include the financial capacity needed to keep the state functioning, maintain resistance, and underpin longer-term security guarantees. Her framing suggested that the loan is being treated not as a discretionary political gesture but as part of the EU’s strategic response to Russia’s war. In the same official remarks, she said there was broad support for advancing the fourth pillar of European security guarantees, focused on defence-sector reform, hybrid and cyber threats, and veterans.
For Brussels, the immediate question is therefore procedural as much as political. If the remaining conditions attached to the Druzhba issue have indeed been met, the next step would be a formal agreement through the EU’s decision-making machinery rather than another round of public signalling. The difficulty is that Brussels institutions often speak optimistically before a file is actually closed, particularly where unanimity is involved. That is why Kallas’s remarks are newsworthy, but also why they should be read carefully.
If the decision does go through, it would represent more than the release of another large support instrument. It would also mark a political shift after a period in which Hungary repeatedly complicated or delayed EU action on Ukraine-related files. Kallas explicitly linked the “new momentum” to the Hungarian elections, making clear that Brussels sees domestic political change in a member state as having immediate consequences for the EU’s collective ability to act. That, in turn, would make the loan story a test of whether the Union can convert a favourable political moment into a formal decision without another last-minute twist.
