The British Prime Minister today called on the West to seize and redistribute across Ukraine the frozen Russian assets “with great courage”.
“D“We must be bolder in seizing hundreds of billions in frozen Russian assets,” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrote in an opinion piece published by the Sunday Times to mark the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“You start by taking the billions these assets generate as interest and sending them to Ukraine,” argues Rishi Sunak. “Then, together with the G7, we need to find legal ways to confiscate assets and send those funds to Ukraine,” he added.
“This will be a tribute to Alexei Navalny's struggle to take responsibility for the actions of the Russian state,” he added, referring to Vladimir Putin's opponent, who died recently in a prison in the Russian Arctic.
In a statement released on Saturday, at the end of a virtual summit under the Italian president, the G7 leaders called on their governments to “continue to work, in accordance with their respective legal systems, on all means of using Russian sovereign assets to support Ukraine.” and international law.”
They reaffirm that “Russian sovereign assets in (their) jurisdictions will be frozen until Russia pays for the damage caused to Ukraine.”
On January 30, the European Union — which froze 200 billion euros of Russian central bank assets — agreed to the first phase of a plan to allocate revenues generated by frozen Russian assets to the reconstruction of Ukraine.
The option of confiscating this money and earmarking it for Ukraine's reconstruction efforts has been ruled out, arguing that this would harm international markets and weaken the euro.
Following the February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, unprecedented sanctions against Moscow led Western banks to freeze approximately $350 billion in Russian public assets, currency and assets owned by Russian oligarchs.
