Britain and the European Union are intensifying talks to seize frozen Russian assets to increase defense spending, Bloomberg reported, citing its own sources.
The parties will discuss how to provide a legal and financial basis for the seizure of billions of dollars of Russian assets. According to Bloomberg, despite the resistance of some EU countries, such as Belgium and Germany, who fear a violation of the principle of state immunity and a negative impact on the euro, some progress has been made in the negotiations.
This issue, according to the agency, may be raised at the talks scheduled for Tuesday between British Foreign Secretary David Lamy and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaia Kallas.
In October 2024, the leaders of the G7 countries issued a joint statement in which they announced that they had reached an agreement on the details of a $ 50 billion loan for Ukraine. It was emphasized that the loans “will be serviced from future proceeds from frozen Russian assets within the framework of the legal systems of the G7 countries and international law“. At the same time, the United States pledged to allocate $20 billion to Ukraine, and the remaining $30 billion will be allocated through the joint efforts of the G7 and the EU. In this regard, the press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov said that the transfer of funds to Ukraine from the proceeds of Russian assets frozen by the West could become grounds for prosecution.
The European Union, Canada, the United States and Japan have frozen Russian assets worth about $300 billion since the start of hostilities. Of these, about $5-6 billion are in the United States, and most of them are in Europe, including the international platform Euroclear in Belgium, where $210 billion is stored. Moscow will immediately take steps in response to the possible confiscation of its assets in the West, declared Maria Zakharova, an official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry.