Several European Union countries plan to revive the issue of using frozen Russian state assets to provide financial aid to Ukraine. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing the Financial Times.
After the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the EU and G7 countries froze about half of Russia's gold and foreign exchange reserves, amounting to nearly 300 billion euros. More than 200 billion euros of these are held in the EU, mainly in the Euroclear settlement system in Belgium.
A number of EU countries, led by Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland, will call on the European Commission to restart work on using these assets to finance Ukraine. The corresponding letter will be sent on Thursday.
The authors of the document ask the European Commission to study the technical and legal mechanisms for using the assets, as well as to determine whether there are alternative ways to circumvent Belgium's resistance.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that Moscow would respond if Western countries confiscate Russian assets. According to him, Russia also has the opportunity not to return the funds of Western countries.