BRUSSELS: Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever has called an EU plan to use frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine “fundamentally wrong,” throwing further doubt on a push by Brussels to agree the move next month.
In a letter to European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen seen by AFP Friday, De Wever pushed back strongly on the initiative and urged Brussels against venturing “into unchartered legal and financial waters.”
The EU executive, and multiple member states, are pressing for the bloc to tap immobilized Russian central bank assets to provide Kyiv with a 140-billion-euro ($162 billion) loan to plug looming budget black holes.
Belgium is the key voice on the issue as it hosts international deposit organization Euroclear, where the vast bulk of the assets are held.
De Wever has repeatedly said the plan could leave his country facing crippling legal and financial reprisals from Moscow — and called for cast-iron guarantees from other EU countries that they will share the risk.
“I will never commit Belgium to sustain on its own the risks and exposures,” he wrote in the four-page letter.
He said he would only agree to the scheme at a crunch EU leaders’ summit on December 18 if binding guarantees “are delivered and signed by member states at the time of decision.”
De Wever’s letter comes as von der Leyen has promised to come up with legal texts soon laying out the exact proposed structure of the scheme.
EU officials have asserted that the risks for Belgium of a successful legal challenge are small — an argument rebutted by the straight-talking De Wever.
“Let me use the analogy of a plane crash: aircraft are the safest way of transportation and the chances of a crash are low, but in the event of a crash the consequences are disastrous,” he said.
Clamour to harness the Russian assets has grown in the EU after a US plan to stop the war in Ukraine that emerged last week suggested the assets should be unfrozen.
Proponents argue that if the bloc does not act now to use the money, then it risks losing control of it under a potential US-backed peace deal.
The proposed EU “reparations loan” envisages that Ukraine would only pay back the funds once Russia has coughed up for the damages inflicted by its invasion.
In the face of Belgian opposition to the plan, von der Leyen has laid out other options to keep financing Kyiv, including EU countries taking out joint borrowing.
The commission has warned that those options would prove more costly for member states at a time when many are struggling with stretched national budgets.
Belgian PM digs in against EU push to use Russian assets for Ukraine
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Belgian PM digs in against EU push to use Russian assets for Ukraine
- De Wever pushed back strongly on the initiative and urged Brussels against venturing “into unchartered legal and financial waters”
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
