Russia will challenge the Ukrainian energy company Naftogaz’s request to the US court to seize Russian assets with the aim of paying for the losses incurred during the occupation of Crimea, the spokesman for the Kremlin (Russian presidency) said on Friday.
“All legal aspects of this process will be analyzed and variants investigated in order to defend our legitimate rights,” said Dmitri Peskov, quoted by the Spanish agency EFE.
In April, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ordered Russia to pay Naftogaz $5 billion (€4.5 billion at current exchange rates).
The amount is intended to compensate for the economic damage suffered by the company due to the seizure of its assets in the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014.
“As Russia has not voluntarily paid these funds to Naftogaz, we intend to use all available mechanisms to recover this amount,” the company’s CEO Oleksi Chernishov said in a statement.
Chernishov explained that Naftogaz will also resort to the courts of other countries to seize the Russian assets in order to collect damages imposed by the court in The Hague.
“We are currently working on this in the United States and other jurisdictions,” he added.
Ukraine has not recognized Russian sovereignty in Crimea or in the Moscow-annexed regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporijia since it invaded the neighboring country on February 24, 2022.
Kiev is demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from all over Ukraine, including Crimea, as a precondition for any talks to end the war.
Moscow has responded to this demand by stating that Kiev needs to get used to the new reality.
The West has also imposed economic sanctions on Russian interests, from oil to gold, to reduce Moscow’s ability to fund Ukraine’s war effort.
Source: DN
