The speaker of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, warned this Sunday that Russia will confiscate the assets of hostile countries if the European Union channels the benefits of Russian assets frozen under war sanctions towards the reconstruction of Ukraine.
“Such a decision will require a symmetrical response from Russia. In this case, many more assets belonging to hostile countries will be confiscated than our frozen resources on European territory,” Volodin said on his Telegram account.
Volodin accused European representatives, such as the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, of trying to maintain their positions at all costs with these types of measures.
“From the bad financial situation to which their countries have led, they once again began to talk about stealing our country’s frozen resources to continue, at their expense, the militarization of Kiev,” he stated.
Ursula von der Leyen revealed on Friday that she will present “a proposal to find a way to use the proceeds from these assets that currently benefit a limited number of financial institutions in the European Union.”
“These windfalls are already quite substantial. The idea is to group them and channel them ‘en bloc’ through the European Union budget for Ukraine and the reconstruction of the country,” Von der Leyen explained.
He added: “The value of these sovereign assets amounts to 211 billion euros. Politically, we agree that, ultimately, Russia must pay for the long-term reconstruction of Ukraine.”
Russian authorities have already called the decision of the United States of America to allocate $5.4 million of frozen assets to Russian oligarchs to support Ukrainian veterans as “theft.”
The European Union froze around 19 billion euros to Russian oligarchs in the first months of the military operation that Russia began in Ukraine in February 2022.
In addition, the West has blocked a total of $300 billion in gold and foreign exchange reserves from the Central Bank of Russia.
Source: TSF
