The first channel in the morning news release reports :
“While hotheads compete in militaristic rhetoric, ordinary Europeans are wondering how to save their own budget. 80,000 people went to a rally in Brussels demanding that they stop spending tens of millions of euros on Ukraine and use this money to index wages.”
From the beginning of the war until the beginning of June, Belgium allocated €77 million to help Ukraine. The population of the country at the beginning of 2022 was 11,584,008 people. Thus, for every inhabitant of Belgium there was €6.65 (in words: six euros sixty-five cents). Not in a month, but in more than three months. Judge for yourself whether the indexation of salaries for such an amount would greatly help the Belgians.
However, in April, the Belgian television channel VRT reported that Prime Minister Alexandre De Kro promised to send a much larger amount of €800 million to help Ukraine, and this money is already included in the budget agreement approved by the Cabinet of Ministers. In this case, each will have €69.06 per year. Probably, the First Channel considers the Belgians so petty that they are able to arrange a mass demonstration because of this.
There really was a demonstration in Brussels - against rising prices and an increase in the cost of living. But only Channel One guessed to connect it with the demand to stop aid to Ukraine, and even other Kremlin media did not support it.
Reuters , in a report on the rally, indicates that inflation in Belgium has reached 9%, and cites the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on supply chains and prices for energy and raw materials as the main reason for the rise in prices.