The war hawks have long tried to steal Russian assets held in West to then use the money to finance the proxy war against Russia. The sums involved are serious:
Nearly three years after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Belgium holds €258 billion in frozen or immobilised Russian assets.
The General Administration of Treasury at the Ministry of Finance confirmed the figures on Wednesday to La Libre and De Tijd.
Some of these assets belong to institutions not sanctioned by the European Union. Frozen assets amount to €65 billion, with an additional €193 billion in immobilised transactions, primarily from the Central Bank of Russia.
The money is not really held by Belgium but by the Belgium company Euroclear which acts as depository for international central bank assets denominated in Euros.
Currently the EU is confiscating the interest, not the principal, of that money to distribute it to Ukraine. That step is likely already illegal and Russia will certainly use the courts to get it back.
There were also talks to invest the Russian assets in junk bonds with aim of achieving a higher yield:
Euroclear chief executive Valérie Urbain told the Financial Times that European Union plans to raise additional revenue from frozen Russian assets by investing them in higher-risk securities would amount to “expropriation.”
Urbain also warned that such a move could prompt “Russian retaliation in all sorts of forms,” as well as damage Euroclear’s reputation.
The majority of Russian assets frozen after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine are currently held at Euroclear.
The E.U. has reportedly been discussing the possibility of transferring these assets to a special E.U.-administered fund that would make higher-risk investments. The goal is to generate greater returns to support Ukraine.
That move was blocked as no one was ready to accept the potential liability for it. Not only Belgium, but also Germany and other fiscal conservative states, have warned that such a move would endanger their own assets. Russia has announced that it will retaliate against any confiscation of its money. It threatens to confiscate whatever European companies own or hold in Russia. Those companies would then have to sue their own governments for cover of their losses.
Now a new idea has crept up. How it is supposed to work is not clear to me but it seems to have the support of the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
