The European Union will discuss the issue of borrowing more funds in response to challenges in connection with the Ukrainian crisis, said the European Commissioner for Economics Paolo Gentiloni, Reuters reported.

France and Italy are pushing for the EU to jointly borrow more money on top of the 800 billion euros already agreed for a pandemic recovery fund to cope with a sharp rise in defense spending and cut Europe's spending and its dependence on Russia for energy.

Proposals of this kind have been made in recent weeks by some European leaders, Gentiloni said.

Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and others are now opposing such new borrowing, arguing that the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine are still unclear and that only 74 billion euros of the 800 billion recovery fund has so far been disbursed.

The $800 billion fund was set up last year to prevent a sharp economic divergence among eurozone countries as a result of the pandemic, as governments already heavily indebted will not be able to borrow as much to finance economic recovery as those whose debt was low.

France argues that the war in Ukraine, like the pandemic, is an exogenous shock that will affect EU countries in different ways, once again creating the risk of deepening economic divergence.