Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the European Union (EU) has frozen assets worth $13.8 billion, EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders said on Tuesday.
“For the moment, we have frozen — coming from oligarchs and other entities — 13.8 billion euros ($13.8 billion), so it’s quite huge,” Reynders told reporters in Prague.
“But I must say that a very large part of it, more than 12 billion … is coming from five member states,” he said before an informal meeting of EU justice ministers held by the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating EU presidency.
He wouldn’t say which five countries, but he did say that he thought the other 27 countries in the bloc would soon do more.
At the middle of June, the German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said that the value of the assets that Germany had frozen by itself was 4.48 billion euros.
In Prague, Ukraine’s Minister of Justice, Denys Maliuska, said that the assets should be used to pay for war damage.
“Currently they are protected by sovereign immunity but our understanding is that assets of a state (that) started a war, committed aggression, shall not be protected by sovereign immunity,” he said.
“We are suffering from economic losses and it does not make sense to cover all those losses by Ukrainian or European taxpayers’ money,” Maliuska said.
At the end of June, an international sanctions task force said that its members, which included several EU countries, had frozen $30 billion in assets belonging to Russian oligarchs and officials.
The Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task Force (REPO) said that its members, which also include Britain, Canada, Japan, the US, and other allies, had frozen $300 billion that belonged to the Russian central bank.
So far, the EU has passed six sets of sanctions against Russia, including a ban on most oil imports from Russia that was passed in early June.
The EU has frozen the assets of 98 companies and banned 1,158 people from entering, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
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