At a crunch summit earlier this month, European leaders turned to a tool that would have seemed unthinkable just a few months earlier to break an impasse: issuing joint debt backed by the common budget to keep Ukraine afloat as the war rages on.
The trick? It bypassed the need for unanimity among member states, gathering those who wanted to work together while keeping Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic out of the deal as a condition for it to go forward. In doing so, the EU not only managed to secure €90 billion for Ukraine for 2026 and 2027 as it had promised, but also showed a new path forward – one where where the unanimity requirement need no longer obstruct coalitions of the willing.
