The EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, proposed the allocation, which requires the unanimous approval of the bloc’s 27 member states, a year ago. All of them except Hungary backed Kallas’s proposal. The Hungarian government demanded that the EU also provide “equal support” to Azerbaijan.
Sources told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that Budapest gave the green light for the allocation on Wednesday during a meeting of the EU’s decision-making European Council in Brussels. It was not clear whether the Council also approved similar aid to Azerbaijan.
The EU had approved its first-ever military aid to Armenia, worth 10 million euros, in July 2024. Its European Peace Facility (EPF) was due to spend the money over the next two-and-a-half years on creating a field hospital and auxiliary facilities for a battalion-size Armenian army unit. The additional EPF funds are supposed to be used in a similar way within the next three years.
Unlike other EU member states, Hungary has openly supported Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The Hungarian Foreign Ministry reaffirmed that support three days after the outbreak of the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war in Karabakh. In September 2023, Budapest reportedly vetoed a statement by the EU member states condemning the Azerbaijani military offensive that displaced Karabakh’s entire population and restored Baku’s control over the region.
Armenia’s former leadership froze diplomatic relations with the central European nation in 2012 in protest against the repatriation of an Azerbaijani army officer who hacked to death a sleeping Armenian colleague in Budapest in 2004. The current Armenian government decided to restore the diplomatic ties in 2022 even though Hungary never apologized for the officer’s release and continued to support Azerbaijan.