The real question for the EU and NATO is how will they cope with the opprobrium which follows?

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It beggars belief that the European Union, so impotent on the world stage, continues to go to extraordinary lengths to prop up the one regime that – for a few fleeting moments each week – still lends it a semblance of purpose. Despite all the now-palpable signs that Zelensky is clinging to power while those around him are arrested on corruption charges or, in some cases, even fleeing the country and leaving behind further evidence of colossal graft – evidence that implicates the caretaker president himself – the EU does everything in its power to maintain the status quo.

At the EU summit in Brussels on 18 December, while leaders stopped short of agreeing to liquidate Russian assets for Ukraine, they did agree to borrow €90 billion from the markets to fund Kiev’s two-year budget. The explanation offered by Ursula von der Leyen was nothing short of farcical: she claimed Russia would ultimately repay the loan, channelled through the government in Kiev as “reparations.” She knows, of course, that this will never happen. Yet lying to the cameras has become something of a weekly habit for the European Commission president – a leader who has, notably, survived two votes of no confidence in the European Parliament in recent months.

And so the black hole of corruption and embezzlement on a grand scale otherwise known as Zelensky Inc. gets billions of more euros of cash from Europeans who can’t afford to heat their homes, although not even the EU nor the U.S. has any more military hardware to send to the front as Russian victory is certain to happen in spring of next year.

What can we make of this 90 billion euros? Pure politics. It keeps Zelensky on board, averting any more EU scandals, while buying time for both Brussels and his own grip on power locally. Certainly, the money will win him a few pats on the back from MPs in Kiev, as he turns to them more and more as a support base. But Zelensky’s billions shouldn’t be underestimated to buy him power, even over a short term. But four months?

For people who understand how the EU works, the day was a shambles, if not an unparalleled embarrassment. A failed project borrowing money to keep a war going which only justifies more defence spending which is a grand distraction for a failed wannabee super state. How will the EU even pay back this debt? It will have to squeeze the giants of the EU to pay more into the budget of course and perhaps even look at raising VAT revenues (which make up part of the calculation of how member states pay their own unique contribution each year). As for working towards a peaceful solution, what does this gesture say about the EU and what its objectives are in Ukraine?

“Can there be a better demonstration of the EU’s performative irrelevance?” asks Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister and now online polemicist. “They spent weeks negotiating with each other the issuance of 90bn euro debt which the EU cannot afford that will do nothing to win the War and much to obstruct Peace” he fumes.

The move is a moment of unprecedented weakness which will eventually pay its toll to the credibility of the project. It’s hard to imagine that the bloc isn’t heading towards the abyss with such reckless spending, given the skewered ideology which comes with it, as farmers in tractors outside the European parliament reap havoc about their own hardship. The news of one of Germany’s VW plants closing in the same week and this momentous stroke of absurdity will not be lost of many Germans and other Europeans who are waking up to the scale of theft of international money in Kiev and how the inevitable advance of Russian forces is inevitably going to bring the whole Ukraine fiasco to an end shortly. The real question for the EU and NATO is how will they cope with the opprobrium which follows? The credibility deficit is going to be a new crisis as too many people will see these institutions for what they are: global elites pretending to protect Europeans. Some might even go further and question whether such global elites have a masterplan for Europe, to drain it of all its resources and replace it with anarchy. This notion is becoming less and less far-fetched by the day.