BRUSSELS — European Union foreign ministers approved on Tuesday the full and accelerated transfer of windfall profits from immobilized Russian state assets to Ukraine, a decision worth roughly 17.4 billion euros through year-end that EU officials described as Brussels’s most concrete answer yet to last week’s fall of Pokrovsk and to a widening sense across the bloc that the burden of sustaining Ukraine’s defense had shifted decisively to Europe.

The agreement, reached at an emergency Foreign Affairs Council convened on five days’ notice, removes the quarterly disbursement rhythm that had governed the windfall mechanism since its creation in 2024 and instructs the Belgian-based central securities depository Euroclear, which holds the bulk of the frozen Russian central bank reserves on EU territory, to transfer accrued earnings to a Ukrainian defense account on a rolling monthly basis. A first tranche of 4.1 billion euros is to clear before May 30, according to the council conclusions read out by EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas at a late-evening news conference.

“What changed in the last six days is not the law and not the math,” Kallas said. “What changed is the geography of this war on the map of Ukraine and the geography of this debate in European capitals. Pokrovsk reorganized this room.”

The vote was unanimous, though Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto attached a written declaration noting that Budapest considered the acceleration “a political response to a battlefield event, not a legal evolution,” language EU diplomats described as Hungary’s now-customary preservation of its position rather than an effort to block consensus. Slovakia, which had registered procedural objections at two prior councils, dropped them after a bilateral call Monday night between Prime Minister Robert Fico and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The decision is narrower than the full asset seizure that Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have pressed for since the start of the year, and which the European Commission has continued to treat as legally premature. But it is substantially broader than the package agreed in February, which had directed only the next two quarters of windfall earnings to Ukraine and had earmarked a portion for the European Peace Facility’s broader procurement pipeline rather than for direct disbursement to Kyiv.

Tuesday’s text routes the funds through a dedicated “Ukraine Defense Window” that the European Investment Bank will administer, with disbursement linked to specific procurement lines — air-defense interceptors, 155-millimeter shells, drone components and electronic-warfare gear — agreed last week at the Ramstein-format meeting. Officials said the structure was designed to address the concern, voiced by several finance ministries, that direct cash transfers risked complicating Ukraine’s IMF program.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha, attending the council in Brussels alongside Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, called the agreement “the largest single mobilization of Russian money for Ukrainian defense since the war began” and said the timing would matter as much as the volume.

“What did not arrive in time to save Pokrovsk can arrive in time to hold the next line,” Sybiha said. “We are not asking Europe to do what it has not promised. We are asking Europe to do it faster than the calendar Moscow is writing for us.”

The fall of Pokrovsk on Saturday, after Ukrainian forces announced a phased withdrawal from the long-contested Donetsk logistics hub, has reshaped the political weather in European capitals in ways that several diplomats described as unmistakable. Two senior EU officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the council’s mood had hardened over the weekend in a way that made the acceleration “the floor, not the ceiling,” with a separate track on full asset confiscation now scheduled for legal review by the council’s working party on private international law beginning May 20.

The European Central Bank, which has consistently warned that outright confiscation could erode confidence in the euro as a reserve currency, was briefed on Tuesday’s structure on Friday and raised no objection, according to a person familiar with the exchange who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. ECB President Christine Lagarde, in a separate appearance at a Brussels think tank earlier in the day, said the windfall route remained “legally and monetarily sound” but cautioned that any move beyond it would require “very careful sequencing.”

Germany, which has historically been among the most cautious EU member states on touching the asset base itself, signaled a meaningful shift on Tuesday. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, attending alongside Merz’s new finance minister Lars Klingbeil for part of the session, said Berlin would now support “a structured examination” of whether the principal of the frozen reserves could be channeled to a multilateral Ukraine reconstruction vehicle once the war ends — a position the previous German government had declined to take.

“The German position is not that the principal is untouchable in perpetuity,” Baerbock said. “The German position is that the legal architecture must be built so that what we do is durable. We are now ready to help build it.”

The Belgian government, which collects roughly 1.7 billion euros annually in tax revenue on Euroclear’s earnings from the frozen assets, will continue to retain that share under Tuesday’s deal, an arrangement that several diplomats acknowledged remained politically uncomfortable but that Brussels had judged necessary to avoid a Belgian veto. Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, in a statement issued from his office, said his government would “contribute meaningfully” to a separate Ukraine support envelope tied to a forthcoming defense-spending review.

Outside the council building on Rue de la Loi, a small group of Ukrainian and Baltic demonstrators held a candlelit vigil for the Ukrainian soldiers killed in the Pokrovsk withdrawal and unfurled a banner that read, in three languages, “It is their money. Use it.” Several ministers acknowledged the demonstration on their way in.

“Politics is what people do with the time the battlefield gives them,” said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis. “Today, the battlefield has given us less time than yesterday. We took a decision that reflects that.”

The next Foreign Affairs Council is scheduled for June 23 in Luxembourg, though Kallas told reporters she would convene a further extraordinary session sooner “if the situation on the ground requires it.” Officials said additional measures on the seizure track and on a renewed sanctions package targeting Russian shadow-fleet operators in the Mediterranean and Baltic would be presented to ministers before the end of the month.