In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the EU along with its allies has always been in a bid to compel Russia to pay the price. They have their eyes set on the Russian assets in the European nations and in one way or another, the European Union has always looked for possibilities to confiscate those assets. The EU has been planning to exploit these assets and has been busy finding legal ways to attack Russia’s assets in Europe for so long but has remained unsuccessful in its bid. So, it resorted to finally going the illegal way and confiscating what it has been eyeing for this long.
In a bid to punish Moscow for its military operation in Ukraine, the EU froze Russian assets in February. But, this wasn’t enough. It even laid options to confiscate those frozen assets in order to make money for war-ravaged Ukraine and pay the crisis-ridden country in the form of reparations. It had set its sights on a legally tricky way to punish Moscow for the damage it had caused in Ukraine but remained unsuccessful. So, it opted for an illegal path for confiscating it. As reported recently, the EU and the West have lost track of the Russian foreign investments that were stashed in the European countries.
According to Charles Lichfield, a senior finance expert at the Atlantic Council, the United States and its European allies are having difficulty discovering two-thirds or more of the Russian assets they froze earlier this year “because they do not know exactly where they are.”
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According to Lichfield, Western banks were compelled by the “freeze” on Russian assets to forbid the movement of those assets back to Russia in order to maintain their access to dollars and euros. However, he speculated that certain African and Asian institutions could not have felt compelled to answer information requests from Western authorities regarding transactions involving Russia.
The US Treasury gleefully declared in June that Washington and its allies had banned or frozen around $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian government, in addition to $30 billion in assets belonging to people who had been sanctioned, including Russian tycoons.
The EU and its western allies have irresponsibly lost the track record of Russian $200 billion or perhaps this is what they want the world to believe. Russian officials are slamming the asset freeze as ‘theft’ because these foreign investments can’t be used without Russia’s consent and enjoy the protection against expropriation.
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Seizing and confiscating Russian assets was posing to be a herculean task given the legal powers Russia has on its side. And hence, one could easily anticipate why the European Union was so eager to bypass every law possible. Even, the new draft it created was bound to fail and hence it has been finding ways to trick Moscow with its assets that have been stashed in European countries but couldn’t find one legal way to fulfil its dreams. EU leaders gave the Commission the duty of researching legal alternatives to take Russian assets and Brussels was busy readying proposals to make sanctions evasion an EU crime, a step that could facilitate and hasten EU’s confiscation — but after getting all its hopes quashed legally, it finally thought of gulping the amount illegitimately.
