Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is having a disproportionately heavy impact on NUTS level 2 regions bordering Russia, Belarus or Ukraine, resulting in job losses, less economic activity and social exclusion. In order to accelerate the implementation of cohesion policy programmes and alleviate the pressure on national budgets as well as to inject the liquidity necessary for the implementation of key investments, an additional one-off pre-financing payment from the ESF+ should be paid for programmes. Because of the adverse impact of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the pre-financing percentage should be further increased for certain programmes covering one or more NUTS level 2 regions bordering Russia, Belarus or Ukraine. In order to encourage re-programming towards key priorities in the context of the mid-term review, the additional one-off pre-financing should be available only where a certain threshold for the reallocation of financial resources to specific crucial priorities is reached.
Text as published in the Official Journal, reproduced verbatim (including any typographical quirks of the source). For the authentic version, see EUR-Lex.
