Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked European Union governments for more money, more air defence and a new round of sanctions on Russia, the latest in a run of requests for European cash since the summer.
Ambassadors from 23 member states attended the meeting in Kyiv on October 1, along with the EU ambassador to Ukraine and the head of the bloc’s advisory mission there. Zelensky asked them to back the use of some €20 billion in unspent loans from the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) programme for defence projects tied to Ukraine.
That came on top of the €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan for 2026 and 2027, agreed by leaders in December 2025 and financed from the EU budget rather than from Russia’s immobilised assets. Ukraine’s defence ministry said on August 30 that it still faced a shortfall of about €23 billion ($27 billion) and asked for part of next year’s European money to be brought forward.
Hours after the meeting, Zelensky announced the first combat use of the FP-7, a tactical ballistic missile built by Ukrainian manufacturer Fire Point, and said the next step was production. The same company makes the Flamingo cruise missile, which Kyiv has used against Russian military and industrial sites.
He told the ambassadors that Ukraine was developing its own anti-ballistic defences, though money remained the condition for deploying them and for building interceptors against Russian jet-powered drones. In August he said closing the funding gap was what would keep Ukraine competitive in long-range strikes on Russian territory.
European Commissioner for Defence Andrius Kubilius told MEPs the same day that the Commission wanted a second SAFE call aimed at doing “more with Ukraine, both in Ukraine and in the EU”, including joint projects run inside the country.
On sanctions, Zelensky said the measures should not be lifted until Russia took concrete steps towards peace and called for further packages. He said his team had drawn up a new list of Russian oligarchs and handed it to European officials.
Four of the six negotiating clusters in Ukraine’s accession talks remain closed, with Hungary blocking clusters two and three since July over guarantees for the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia.
EU leaders are due to return to Ukraine’s financing at their summit on October 15-16, with Belgium still opposed to touching the roughly €185 billion in Russian central bank assets held by Euroclear in Brussels. More than 120 MEPs wrote to EU leaders in September urging them to reopen that question.
The bloc and its member states have committed close to €200 billion since February 2022, at a time when national budgets are under strain and the next long-term EU budget is still being fought over.
