Antifake
Kremlin-backed media are reporting that Hungary has calculated the potential cost of Ukraine's accession to the European Union. State-owned RIA Novosti — in an April 15 article titled “Orbán’s Adviser Reveals the Cost of Ukraine Joining the EU” — wrote the following:
“Ukraine’s entry into the EU will cost the bloc €2.5 trillion, which is 12 times the total EU budget for 2025, said Balázs Orbán, political director to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
‘Ukraine’s accession to the European Union will place an unbearable burden on us — not only politically, but economically as well. According to calculations by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, Ukraine’s integration into the EU will cost the bloc a total of €2.5 trillion, which is more than 12 times the EU’s 2025 budget,’ Orbán wrote on Facebook.
The adviser added that ‘even the most conservative estimates put the cost of Ukraine’s reconstruction at $500 billion, while Ukrainian sources claim it could be €1 trillion per year.’ He also noted that maintaining Ukraine as a functioning state costs $100 billion annually, and the U.S. has already announced it no longer wants to participate in covering those expenses.
Orbán further stressed that, if Ukraine joins the EU, 25% of the bloc’s agricultural subsidies would go to Ukraine — depriving Hungarian farmers of support.
‘According to EU documents, with Ukraine’s accession, current net beneficiaries — including Hungary — would likely become net contributors. In other words, we would no longer receive funds but would instead have to pay — not only for Ukraine’s functioning but also for its development,’ Orbán emphasized.
He argued that admitting a country ‘with such unstable statehood and an uncertain social and economic situation’ would prevent the EU from solving any of its other pressing problems and would seriously weaken Hungary’s strategic position.
On April 14, Hungary launched a nationwide public consultation on Ukraine’s EU membership. Questionnaires are being sent by mail and contain a single question: ‘Do you support Ukraine’s accession to the EU?’ with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ as options. Results are to be forwarded to Brussels after the consultation ends on June 20. Unlike referendums, these public consultations in Hungary have no voter turnout requirement.
Earlier, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán claimed that Brussels wants Ukraine to join the EU by 2030, but stated that the final decision lies with Hungary. He warned that Ukraine’s accession would devastate the Hungarian economy. According to Orbán, the EU does not aim to help Ukraine but to 'colonize' it, and pushing Kyiv to continue the war is one such method of colonization. He declared that while Hungary supports the EU, it opposes the fast-track integration of Ukraine. Without Budapest’s consent, Ukraine will never join the bloc, he said.”
As a sign of the times, the RIA Novosti article featured a note at the bottom: “The activities of Meta (social networks Facebook and Instagram) are banned in Russia as extremist.”
As usual, the Kremlin’s mostly false version of events does contain a sliver of truth. Hungarian publication Hungary Today did indeed report on Balázs Orbán’s remarks, delivered at the Economx Money Talks forum in Budapest:
“Ukraine’s forced accession to the EU would consume the resources needed to address all the other challenges facing the European Union and would severely weaken Hungary’s strategic position, Balázs Orbán stressed. The Prime Minister’s political director pointed out that the country’s full integration would cost around €2,500 billion spread over several years, which is 12 times the EU’s budget this year.
Speaking at the Economx Money Talks 25 business conference in Budapest on Monday, Balázs Orbán highlighted that the cost of rebuilding Ukraine is huge: conservative estimates put the cost at $500 billion, while Ukrainian sources put it at up to €1,000 billion. In addition, keeping the country running would cost $100 billion a year, which would also be largely covered by the EU, he said.”
However, the Hungarian financial news portal Economx — which organized the forum — cited a different figure altogether: €20 trillion as the projected cost of Ukraine’s accession, again attributing the number to Balázs Orbán.
Yet in none of these reports does the adviser explain how such staggering figures were calculated — or what specific components make up the total costs. Notably, Balázs Orbán is not an economist by training but a political scientist, and the identity of those responsible for the calculations remains unknown.
Meanwhile, the less-famous Orbán’s projections diverge dramatically from those of international research centers. In March of last year, the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel published its own estimate, placing the cost of Ukraine’s EU accession between €110 billion and €136 billion. Euronews summarised the study’s findings:
“Ukraine's potential accession into the European Union could have an impact of between €110 billion and €136 billion on the bloc's seven-year budget, according to a new report by the Bruegel think tank.
This would represent 0.10% and 0.13% of the EU's gross domestic product (GDP).
The projection uses the existing rules and design of the 2021-2027 budget to extract a projection of how much money the war-torn nation would be entitled to receive after obtaining the coveted membership. Ukraine was first declared a candidate in June 2022 and was given the go-ahead for accession negotiations in December 2023.
The findings exclude the enormous costs of reconstruction, estimated to be at least €450 billion over the next decade, and assume Ukraine would eventually regain all the territories in the East that Russian troops have occupied.
Bruegel forecasts Kyiv would be entitled to:
€85 billion from the Common Agricultural Policy, the bloc's massive envelope of subsidies for farmers. As the programme is rolled out according to hectares (farmed land), Ukraine, with its mighty agricultural sector, would become the biggest recipient.
€32 billion from the Cohesion Policy, which finances development projects. The allocation of cohesion funds is capped at 2.3% of a member state's GDP. Without this cap, Ukraine would be entitled to about €190 billion, six times more.
€7 billion from other programmes.
In total, Ukraine would receive roughly €136 billion (at current prices) over a seven-year budgetary period. This is much lower than the €186 billion that the Financial Times reported in October based on a leaked study drafted by the EU Council.
However, if the country fails to win back the occupied East and suffers a permanent reduction of its territory, population, and economic resources, Bruegel estimates the allocation would fall to €110 billion.
Ukraine's membership would ‘hardly change’ the ratio between net payers and net beneficiaries of the EU budget but would nevertheless trigger a tangible reshuffling of budget allocations. Even if the country were to engineer a robust recovery after the war, it would remain considerably poorer than the poorest EU state, Bulgaria, and probably than those in the Western Balkans.”
The cost projections released by Bruegel and the EU Council exclude Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction expenses, based on the expectation that these will be financed not only by EU member states but also by private investors. In this context, Balázs Orbán’s estimates of reconstruction needs are actually aligned with expert assessments. A joint report published in February 2025 by the Ukrainian government, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the United Nations puts the cost of rebuilding Ukraine at $524 billion over the next decade.
The much higher figure of $1 trillion did not originate from Ukrainian sources, but rather from the European Investment Bank, which cited the amount in March 2024. At the time, Bloomberg reported that a preliminary recovery plan for Ukraine was already in place. Even so, including such figures in overall EU expenditure projections is misleading, as a large share of funding is expected to come from private sector investments — not only from EU countries, but also from the United States, Turkey, and South Korea.
It appears that RIA Novosti — unintentionally — pointed to the real reason behind Balázs Orbán’s unsubstantiated claims involving completely fantastical cost estimates: they are nothing more than political messaging ahead of Hungary’s public consultation on Ukraine’s accession to the EU.