Belgium will send aid to Ukraine in the amount of 200 million euros received from the proceeds of frozen Russian assets, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo said at a joint press conference with the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, and the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, in The Hague.
The funds will go to military supplies and refugee support. The use of Russian assets, as noted by the Belgian Prime Minister, is justified from an economic and moral point of view.
According to the Ministry of Finance of Belgium, Russian assets totaling EUR 58 billion have been frozen in the country, and transactions related to Russia worth EUR 191 billion have been blocked. Brussels decided to use taxes from the interest received from the placement of Russian assets to support Ukraine. Now Belgium wants to use the interest in full, Alexander de Croo emphasized.
According to the media, the Belgian authorities received EUR 625 million in taxes from Russian assets located in the country.
According to preliminary estimates of the European Union, at least 33 billion euros of the 300 billion euros of frozen reserves of the Russian Central Bank are on deposits in EU countries.
Bloomberg, citing sources, previously wrote that the legal service of the European Commission informed the EU countries that the bloc can temporarily use part of the frozen assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation to invest them and direct them to the reconstruction of Ukraine. Russian assets cannot be expropriated, and at a certain point the principal amount of assets and interest will have to be returned to Russia. If the EU suffers losses while managing Russian assets, the EU will be forced to pay compensation to Russia from its own budget.
The agency notes that this proposal is controversial and is just beginning to be discussed. Some EU countries are concerned about how legally this is justified.
