Rishi Sunak: Seize Frozen Russian Assets to Help Ukraine
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has urged Western countries to take a more aggressive stance and seize frozen Russian assets to redistribute to Ukraine, AFP and Reuters report.
"We need to be bolder in seizing the hundreds of billions in frozen Russian assets," Sunak wrote in an article for the Sunday Times, marking two years since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"First, we can use the interest those assets generate to help Ukraine," Sunak said. "Then, in coordination with our G7 partners, we need to find legal ways to confiscate the assets themselves and rebuild Ukraine," he added, as quoted by Agerpres.
"This would be a fitting tribute to the fight of Alexei Navalny to hold the Russian state to account for its actions," he added, referring to the Russian opposition figure who was imprisoned and died in Russia's Arctic region.
In a statement released on Saturday at the end of a video conference meeting, G7 leaders called on their governments to continue to act "through all possible means by which Russia's sovereign assets could be used to support Ukraine, in accordance with our legal systems and international law."
They reaffirmed that "Russian sovereign assets in (their) jurisdictions will remain frozen until Russia pays for the damage caused to Ukraine."
On January 30, the European Union – which has frozen 200 billion euros of assets belonging to the Central Bank of Russia – reached an agreement on the first stage of a plan to allocate the income generated by frozen Russian assets to the reconstruction of Ukraine.
Translation by Iurie Tataru
