The EU has agreed a €90 billion loan to Ukraine that does not steal frozen Russian assets. Good for them. Stealing is bad.

Good for Belgium and others that they stood up for what the 'international rules-based order' is supposed to mean.

The loan is expected to be repaid from post-war Russian reparations. Good luck with that. Reparations are for losers.

Traditionally - which FNN knows means nothing anymore - reparations are paid by the loser and at the moment the loser is NATO, the entity that provoked, provisioned and prolonged the war after undermining the 2022 Istanbul peace talks.

The reparations due since then must be high, let alone the enormous moral bill for all those Russians and Ukrainians killed since the peace talks were undermined and Ukraine was encouraged to fight on to the last Ukrainian.

French President Macron is apparently now eager to 'engage' with the Russians, presumably to help ensure that the EU gets its money back or more likely that EU/French businesses get preferential treatment to re-enter the Russian market post-war.

But, given the situation on the ground at the moment, the likelihood of the EU getting any of its money back, without some kind of US-led enforcement on Russia, seems slim.

And if Ukraine defaults on this loan then it will be harder to get future loan money except in exchange for more resource/land handovers as Ukraine switches from being a vassal state of Russia to a vassal state of western institutions, just like Greece became years before.

The western MSM likes to portray the whole of eastern Ukraine as a wasteland devastated solely by Russia but that's not exactly the truth.

There was plenty of wasteland in eastern Ukraine well before 2022 when Russian invaded, due partly to Ukrainian bombing and shelling of their own people post-Maidan coup.

The scenario that Russia might pay reparations to the loser Ukraine is absurd. A comforting delusion that Albert Camus might have got a kick out of if he were still here.

Talking of reparations, Human Rights Watch produced a lengthy report on the destruction of Mariupol which stated:

[https://www.hrw.org/feature/russia-ukraine-war-mariupol/report]

Residents cowered in basements, living in fear of airstrikes, incessant shelling, and clashes between the armies.

A rather ironic statement as this was what Ukrainian President Poroshenko famously promised as the future for 'separatists' in eastern Ukraine and Ukraine often delivered on the ground during 2014-2022 according to Benoit Paré.

What's much more likely is that Russia will end up paying to repair the territories it has gained from the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the West will end up paying for the repairs - and the odd golden toilet - in democratic, European western Ukraine.