Summit divided on idea of loan secured against Russian assets, as Belgium seeks guarantees if scheme goes wrong
EU leaders are racing to secure a funding deal for Ukraine that has been cast as a choice between “money today or blood tomorrow”, but Belgium continues to oppose a loan secured against Russia’s frozen assets.
At a summit billed as make or break, EU leaders are discussing an unprecedented move to tap some of Russia’s €210bn sovereign assets frozen in the bloc days after the full-scale invasion of 2022.
Under the scheme, the EU would provide Kyiv with a €90bn loan to help keep Ukraine in the fight, as Russia ekes out gains on the battlefields.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said leaders had a simple choice: “Either money today or blood tomorrow.”
I’m not behind our prime minister at all, but the core of what he’s saying is “we’ll only do this if we share the risks involved among the whole EU”. Given that no-one seems to be willing to do that, it would appear that he has a point that the risks are significant. I also heard him call the idea “theft”, which sounds crazy in the context we’re in. But then he’s talking about the practice of taking money from countries we’re not at war with, setting a bad precedent if you want to be a financial center for the world. That one’s a little far fetched, even without a formal declaration of war, Russia isn’t just a random country at this point we have a few issues with.
Yeah, the thing is there’s no way to “share the risk”. Belgium is legally responsible for the money. Other countries can promise or sign obligations that they will pay it back to Belgium in case they are held responsible in the future but in the end there’s no way to guarantee it (governments can change, countries can pull out of treaties). So he’s basically saying “we only do this if you do something impossible”. In the end it’s his decision to take and he decided he would rather not help.
The problem is that in this ultrafinancialised world, changes in expectations can have immediate consequences.
If we take that money and eg. Saudi or Chinese investments leave Belgium, that will have immediate consequences.
Not that I approve of any of this, and we should help Ukraine more, but capital runs the world.