British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Sunday called on the West to be “bolder” in seizing frozen Russian assets for redistribution to Ukraine, and advocated initially sending interest on these assets to kyiv. “We must be bolder in confiscating hundreds of billions of frozen Russian assets,” wrote the head of the British Government in a column published in the Sunday Times on the second anniversary of the Russian invasion.
“What a tribute it would be to Alexei Navalny’s fight to hold the Russian state accountable for its actions,” he added, referring to the opponent who recently died in a prison in the Russian Arctic.
Allocate income generated by frozen assets to reconstruction
In their statement on Saturday following a virtual summit under the Italian presidency, G7 leaders called on their governments to continue working “on all possible avenues through which Russian sovereign assets could be used to support Ukraine, according to our respective legal systems and international law. They reaffirm that “Russian sovereign assets in (their) jurisdictions will remain frozen until Russia pays for damages caused to Ukraine.”
On January 30, the European Union – which froze 200 billion euros of the assets of Russia’s Central Bank – reached an agreement on the first stage of a plan to allocate revenue generated by frozen Russian assets to the reconstruction of Ukraine. The option of confiscating this money and dedicating it to Ukraine’s reconstruction efforts is ruled out, because it would risk shaking international markets and weakening the euro.
After the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, unprecedented economic sanctions against Moscow led to the freezing by Western banks of around $350 billion in Russian public assets, currencies and property belonging to Russian oligarchs. According to an estimate published two weeks ago by the World Bank (WB), the UN, the European Union and the Ukrainian government, Ukraine will need 486 billion dollars for its recovery and reconstruction.
Source: BFM TV
