JAKARTA - British Foreign Minister David Lemmy on Tuesday said Europe should switch from freezing Russian assets to confiscation of assets, strengthening Britain's position on how the West should use frozen bonds and securities since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the United States and its allies banned transactions with Russia's central bank and finance ministry, blocking Russian state assets worth USD 300 - 350 billion.
Most of them are government bonds of Europe, the US and UK which are held in European securities storage agencies.
European leaders want to use the asset to help rebuild Ukraine, but have yet to reach an agreement on how to avoid lawsuits or create problematic international precedents, with some options under consideration.
"Europe must act quickly, and I believe we should move from asset freeze to asset confiscation," Foreign Minister Lemmy told parliament when asked if he would support emergency laws to confiscate and reuse the assets in support of Ukraine.
"This is not a problem that can be handled alone by any government. We must act together with European allies," he said.
However, Foreign Minister Lemmy did not explain in detail how he wanted to handle the assets.
In a debate in parliament in January about what to do with frozen assets, the foreign minister for Europe, Stephen Doughty, simply said Britain was considering "all possible legal action that could be taken to ensure that Ukraine had the support it needed".
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It is known, the European Union estimates that around 210 billion euros (220.58 billion US dollars) of the frozen money is stored in the block, mainly in Euroclear, a securities storage agency centered in Brussels, Belgium.
Several Western officials, particularly in the German Government and the European Central Bank, were reluctant to confiscate state foreign exchange reserves, warning that the measure could face lawsuits and weaken the euro as a reserve currency.
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