For a month, the EU has pretended to deliberate over $227 billion in frozen Russian assets as Ukraine faces a $27 billion budget hole. Sweden reopened the question on August 27.
The Political Deadlock
The Commission’s response is that it needs a “clear instruction from member states.” Translation: nobody wants to own the decision, so the decision gets postponed until the next emergency.
The technical work is basically done. Belgian and European experts have reportedly reached agreement on the outlines of a deal. The political layer is where it dies.
Belgium’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, has conditions: Euroclear must be shielded from legal and financial risk, liability must be shared, and other jurisdictions holding Russian assets, Japan, the UK, France, Canada, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the US, must take on equivalent commitments. It amounts to a veto dressed as prudence.
Workarounds Outside the Official Process
The workarounds are getting more creative because the official process is frozen. Ukraine’s finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko, is pushing for a mechanism that would strip custody of Russian assets from Belgium and Euroclear entirely.
Hugo Dixon has launched a site called The Russian Transfer with a draft regulation designed to take Belgium out of the line of fire. These are serious proposals from serious people, and they exist because the institutional route has become a waiting room.
Structural Absurdity and Political Cowardice
The absurdity is structural. The EU found the legal creativity to freeze the assets, to isolate Russia’s central bank, to build a $102 billion loan facility for Ukraine. But actually using the aggressor’s money to pay for the aggressor’s destruction suddenly makes every lawyer in Brussels discover constitutional modesty.
Luxembourg’s foreign minister said it plainly: some leaders bury their heads in the sand like ostriches. The problem is real. Not Euroclear’s balance sheet. Not sovereign immunity doctrine. The problem is political cowardice dressed up as legal caution.
The West keeps asking Ukraine to win with one hand tied. The opposite side. Use the money.
Every month of delay, Ukraine pays for its defense with its own budget, its own debt, and the lives of its citizens, while the assets of the state trying to erase it sit untouched in European clearinghouses.