Rarely are the moral, legal, political and economic arguments for action as strong as in the case for confiscating Russia’s state assets to fund Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction — now at over €400 billion and growing rapidly.
However, recently, far too much time and political capital has been spent on the separate issue of taxing profits from Russia’s underlying state assets, €200 billion of which is deposited at Euroclear — a financial pipeline based in Brussels.
Euroclear is an intermediary, transferring funds from one depository to another, and normally it wouldn’t hold these assets — it didn’t before the outbreak of the full-scale invasion. But now awash with cash, Euroclear’s position is that this wartime profit — around a hefty €4 billion in 2023 — is its own private property.
Euroclear’s narrow commercial interest in keeping this blood money cannot stand. But in any event, this is a sideshow. Europe needs to seize not just the profits from but all of Russia’s underlying assets — and it must do so now.
Morally, everyone agrees that Russia must pay for the death and destruction it has visited on Ukraine. The United Nations General Assembly has held unambiguously that Russia “must bear the legal consequences” for its war of aggression, including reparations.
There has also been a lot of legal analysis arriving at the same conclusion we reached in the European Parliament a couple of months ago: Russia must pay now.
In October, the Parliament accepted an amendment of mine to the Ukraine Facility, unequivocally stating that confiscating Russia’s public assets is justified “under customary international law, either as a collective countermeasure in response to Russia’s violation of the fundamental rule prohibiting wars of aggression or as an act of collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.”
Likewise, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States House of Representatives approved a proposed bill authorizing the confiscation of Russian state assets. And Canadian law already permits the seizure of public assets.
Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz is an S&D member of the European Parliament, and a former prime minister and foreign minister of Poland.
