EU to provide Ukraine with additional €900m for weapons using proceeds from Russian assets

The European Union will allocate an additional €900 million from extraordinary revenues generated by frozen Russian assets for the purchase of weapons and ammunition for Ukraine, increasing the EU’s recent total support for Ukraine’s defence industry to €3.3 billion.

Charles Fries, Deputy Secretary General of the European External Action Service, emphasised during the opening of the second Ukraine–EU Defence Industry Forum that the €900 million to be allocated for Ukraine’s arms procurement will come from extraordinary revenues of frozen Russian assets.

"On Friday, Kaja Kallas [EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs] announced that the EU would invest €1 billion in Ukraine's defence industry. [...] But this is not all. In the coming two weeks, we will also spend an additional €900 million to procure weapons and ammunition for Ukraine, all of this funded with the windfall profits from the frozen Russian assets.

With this, the EU has now provided a total of €3.3 billion to support Ukraine and its defence industry," he said.

Fries also reported that "contracts were signed in Lviv last week, and money will now be invested in the cutting edge of Ukrainian defence industry, for example, the production of drones and missiles".

As previously reported by European Pravda, the EU pledged to transfer €1 billion in proceeds from Russian assets to purchase arms from Ukrainian defence companies.

In early April, EU Ambassador to Ukraine Katarína Mathernová said the EU would soon receive a second tranche of funds from the profits of immobilised Russian assets, amounting to €2.1 billion. "The majority of the funds will be used to purchase weapons, ammunition and air defence systems for Ukraine in the form of grants," she noted.