US and EU 'immediately' supply weapons to Ukraine, Kiev is ready to spend 600 million Euros to reach this agreement in Bulgaria

On July 7, the European Union (EU) announced that it will spend 500 million Euros to boost production, increase ammunition for Ukraine, and supplement reserves for member countries.

Mỹ và EU ‘tức tốc’ nạp vũ khí cho Ukraine, Kiev sẵn sàng chi 600 triệu Euro để đạt được thỏa thuận này ở Bulgaria

The European Union (EU) has confirmed that it will spend 500 million Euros to speed up the production of weapons to help Ukraine, while the US has decided to send Kiev cluster munitions - part of a new aid package worth 800 million USD. (Source: Shutterstock)

Representatives of the European Council and the European Parliament (EP) have reached a provisional agreement – expected to come into force before the end of this month.

Accordingly, European arms companies will receive additional subsidies to increase production capacity and resolve some bottlenecks.

It is also part of a broader EU effort to provide more ammunition and weapons to Ukraine, including 155mm artillery shells that Kiev is desperate to obtain amid its increasingly attritional conflict with Russia.

On the same day, according to some sources, the US President Joe Biden's administration decided to provide thousands of cluster bombs to Ukraine in a new military aid package worth up to 800 million USD.

Washington will do this, despite concerns that the weapon is controversial because it could cause civilian casualties, the source said.

US officials confirmed that this military aid to Ukraine will be announced on July 7 (local time).

The weapons are expected to come from Pentagon stockpiles and include Bradley and Stryker armored vehicles and a range of ammunition, such as howitzer rounds and the HIMARS High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.

However, it remains to be seen how Washington’s allies will react to supplying cluster bombs to Ukraine. More than two-thirds of the 30 member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have signed the 2010 Convention on Cluster Munitions.

In addition, the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) on July 7 warned Washington not to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine because of the serious risks these weapons pose to civilians.

In another development, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's first visit to Bulgaria on July 6, Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov revealed that Kiev has begun discussions to buy two of the country's nuclear reactors to address future power shortages.

“We have started serious negotiations on using reactors from the Bulgarian Belene nuclear power plant – for one of the plants in Ukraine. This is just the beginning of the negotiations, as many technical, financial and economic parameters need to be discussed,” Prime Minister Denkov said.

Bulgaria bought the two reactors from Russia more than five years ago and used them for the Belene nuclear power plant project, which has now been abandoned because Moscow is no longer involved in building the reactors and the Eastern European country cannot foot the bill.

Most Bulgarian lawmakers have now agreed to give the government 30 days to negotiate the sale of the nuclear reactors to Kiev for 600 million euros.

This is also the amount Bulgaria's state-owned National Electricity Company paid Russia's Atomstroyexport for the two reactors, steam generators and the rest of the equipment.

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