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After Four Months Without Tranche: EU Ready to Transfer €2.7 Billion — But the Council Managed to Act at the Last Moment

Since December, Ukraine has not received funds from the Ukraine Facility: the Verkhovna Rada delayed reforms, and the budget lost 3.6 billion euros for the entire 2025. April's vote unblocked a new tranche — and now the price of each subsequent parliamentary failure is measured not only in billions, but also in social payments.

Tetiana Suchkova-Ladik

By Tetiana Suchkova-Ladik

April 16, 2026 · 2 min read

After Four Months Without Tranche: EU Ready to Transfer €2.7 Billion — But the Council Managed to Act at the Last Moment
Фото з Telegram Юлії Свириденко

Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko announced a forthcoming tranche of €2.7 billion after meeting with European Commission Vice President for Enlargement Marta Kos. The funds will be provided under the Ukraine Facility program — a mechanism through which the EU disburses up to €50 billion to Ukraine during 2024–2027 in exchange for specific reforms.

Ukraine received the previous tranche back in December 2025 — at that time it was €2.3 billion. More than four months have passed since then without new payments.

Why the money got stuck

The reason for the delay is not bureaucracy in Brussels, but parliament's inability to timely adopt agreed-upon laws. According to data from the analytical consortium RRR4U, in 2025 Ukraine failed to meet program indicators by more than €3.6 billion: 14 points of Ukraine's Plan remained unimplemented, with most in the fourth quarter.

On the eve of the April vote, European Commission Vice President Marta Kos sent a letter directly to the Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, pointing to 11 bills on which up to €4 billion in financing depends. European Commission spokeswoman Arianna Podesta clarified: Ukraine will be able to submit a request for a tranche only after key laws enter into force — not after voting, but specifically after they come into effect.

What Parliament adopted

On April 7, parliament supported three bills that are conditions for disbursement: on digitalization of enforcement proceedings, on integration into the EU energy market, and on reform of the public supervision system. Svyrydenko named these specifically as the grounds for the new financing request.

«This funding is extremely important for all civil expenditures in our budget, since our own revenues go to defense»

Maksym Samolyuk, economist at the Center for Economic Strategy

Samolyuk has repeatedly warned that delays in reforms directly undermine spending on education, healthcare, and social protection — that is, budget items that are not financed from defense revenues.

Scale and risks

€2.7 billion is approximately 110 billion hryvnia at current exchange rates, or over 6% of all planned social expenditures in the state budget for 2026. In total, since the start of the full-scale war, the EU has transferred €70.7 billion to Ukraine; of these, €26.7 billion is within the Ukraine Facility.

Meanwhile, the situation is far from stable. The state budget deficit for 2026 amounts to 2.4 trillion hryvnia, and most of this sum was planned to be covered by international assistance. Chair of the Budget Committee of the Verkhovna Rada Roksolana Pidlasa warns: the shortage of external financing this year could reach 19 billion dollars. In March 2026, the Rada already failed a vote on one of the bills in the Ukraine Facility package.

The April vote unblocked a specific tranche — but Ukraine's Plan still has dozens of unmet indicators. If the Verkhovna Rada starts failing votes again, the next tranche may be delayed just like this one: the question is not whether there is money in Brussels, but whether the reform will be voted on before the deadline of the next quarter.

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May 26, 2026