At an event organised by the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament on Tuesday 20 May, experts argued in favour of confiscating the €200 billion of Russian public assets immobilised in the European Union in order to help Ukraine finance its reconstruction and compensate the population affected by Russia’s war of aggression.
It is time to “make Putin pay” for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine by confiscating Russian money tied up in the EU, said Bill Browder, speaking on behalf of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign. According to Browder, there is “no legal distinction” that would prevent doing for Russian assets what the G7 countries and the EU are already doing by re-using the profits generated by these assets to grant loans to Ukraine in 2025.
A lawyer with the organisation Razom for Ukraine, Yuliya Ziskina, spoke of a “unique opportunity” to help Ukraine financially in the face of the “imminent danger” that a single Member State - “Hungary or Slovakia”, according to her - would refuse to renew EU sanctions against the Kremlin at the beginning of July, and that Russian assets would evaporate and contribute to the Russian war effort.
Ms Ziskina set out a two-stage process for confiscating the €200 billion of the Central Bank of Russia’s assets held mainly in Belgium within the Euroclear clearing house. Belgium and the other countries that have frozen these assets should first transfer them to separate bank accounts, and then set up an International Finance Facility to manage these assets on behalf of Ukraine so that they contribute to the country’s defence, to its reconstruction, and to compensation for the affected population.
International law allows that in the event of a violation of this law’s underlying principles, any country outside the conflict can take steps to restore international law, even if it is not itself a belligerent, according to Ms Ziskina, who is convinced that “inaction is not neutrality, but complicity”.
Asked by Agence Europe about the position of the ECB, which warned of risks to financial stability in the euro area if Russian state assets were confiscated, Petras Auštrevičius (Renew Europe, Lithuanian) said that “Europe would be better off if we protected its financial system from dirty money”.
Mr Browder described the ECB’s concerns as “hypothetical”. If these assets were returned to Russia to fuel the Russian war effort, they would constitute “a threat to the physical integrity of Europe”, he added.
As for Ms Ziskina, she brushed aside fears of a weakening of the euro area as a safe haven for the world’s currency reserves. Confiscating Russian public assets is “not a financial question” but a “national security question”, she stressed. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)