Reconstruction of Ukraine at the expense of Russia. The EU is facing the problem of finding money for the Central Bank

The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said that all Russian assets seized by the European authorities - the yachts of the oligarchs, their villas in the Mediterranean, and the reserves of the Central Bank - should be used to rebuild Ukraine.

However, the EU's project to confiscate the assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation may fail due to the complexity of the process of finding these funds. It is currently unclear where exactly in Europe the reserves of the Russian central bank are located - this is the largest amount of frozen money, according to the Commission, about 300 billion euros. 

It is very difficult to track Russian reserves abroad because they are not gold bullion stored in the vaults of other institutions, such as the Bank of England or the Bank of France. Rather, they are balances in a variety of different accounts that are sometimes difficult to attribute to the Central Bank of Russia.

The Commission even considered imposing penalties against those EU countries that did not provide information on the location of Russian assets quickly enough. But more than a dozen governments opposed it, so the plan was rejected. It is not known when we can expect what Brussels officials call a "map of Russian money."

Even if Brussels finds all of Russia's assets, the burning question remains: Will the EU be able to use this money to rebuild Ukraine? The political will to do so is there. But the legal obstacles are high. 

In an unpublished document obtained by WELT, the European Commission concludes that the frozen reserves cannot be touched because when the war is over, they will have to be returned to Russia.

But officials have come up with something. They could invest this money and at least make the income from it available to Ukraine. The Commission proposes to invest the frozen reserves of the Russian central bank in European government bonds and expects an annual return of 2.6 percent. This "exceptional measure" is probably legally possible, the European Commission says, especially given Russia's "gross violations" of international law.

Not everything is so simple when it comes to the assets of oligarchs. There are different approaches to freezing the wealth of Russians. Some EU countries have frozen large sums, such as Belgium and Luxembourg. But other countries have made little or no progress. For example, Malta and Greece have frozen only 200 000 euros of such assets.

The Commission suggests that tens of billions of euros of sanctioned persons could still be frozen in the EU. But their assets are often well hidden: yachts belong to companies with opaque structures, villas to distant relatives who are not on the EU list.

Source: WELT