War in Ukraine Moscow threatens to confiscate European assets if Brussels allocates Russian funds to Ukraine

The president of the Duma or chamber of deputies of Russia, Viacheslav Volodin, has warned today that his country will confiscate the assets of unfriendly countries if the European Union (EU) channels the benefits from Russian assets frozen in Ukraine to the reconstruction of Ukraine. the framework of sanctions for the war.

“Such a decision will require a symmetrical response from the Russian Federation. In that case, many more assets belonging to unfriendly countries will be confiscated than our frozen resources on European territory,” Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel.

Volodin accused European officials such as the president of the European Commission, Úrsula von del Leyen, of trying to stay in their current positions at all costs with measures like that.

“Starting from the bad financial situation to which they led their countries, they again began to talk about the theft of our country’s frozen resources to continue, at their expense, the militarization of Kiev,” he said.

The president of the European Commission announced on Friday that she will present “a proposal to find a way to use the income from these assets that currently benefit a limited number of financial institutions in the European Union.”

“These windfall benefits are already quite considerable. And the idea is to pool them and then channel them through the EU budget ‘en bloc’ to Ukraine and for the reconstruction of Ukraine,” Von der Leyen explained.

He added that “the value of these sovereign assets amounts to 211 billion euros. And, politically, we agree that Russia must ultimately pay for the long-term reconstruction of Ukraine.”

Russian authorities have already branded as “theft” the US decision to allocate $5.4 million of frozen assets to Russian oligarchs to support Ukrainian veterans.

The EU froze some 19 billion euros to Russian oligarchs in the first months of the military campaign that Russia began in Ukraine in February 2022.

In addition, the West blocked a total of $300 billion in gold and foreign exchange reserves from the Central Bank of Russia.