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The immobilised assets from the Russian Central Bank are not “the primary focus” at the moment, the European Commission said on Friday amid growing calls to channel the €210 billion into additional support for cash-strapped Ukraine.
Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, backed by the Baltics, have asked the executive to devise new legal options to tap the assets.
Ukraine has endorsed the initiative and pitched creating an EU-owned custodian to hold the assets kept at Euroclear, a depository in central Brussels.
And this week, a cross-party group of 122 members of the European Parliament sent a letter to the Commission, pleading to “reopen the political discussion” on the assets and advance the custodian pitch to “overcome” the Belgian objections.
But on Friday, the Commission sought to tamp down the momentum.
“That’s not the primary focus,” Paula Pinho, the Commission’s chief spokesperson, said. “We had worked extensively on this, and now the focus is somewhere else.”
The Commission’s priority, Pinho explained, is twofold.
On the one hand, to continue the gradual disbursements of the €90 billion loan, which covers financial and military assistance for Ukraine.
On the other hand, to engage with the Ukrainian government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to figure out the exact scope of the budget shortfall.
Last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy caught allies off guard when he asked them to plug a $27 billion (€23 billion) deficit in the Ministry of Defence. Kyiv has also flagged €32.6 billion in uncovered budget needs for next year.
Since then, EU and IMF officials have been scrambling to understand the nature and the origin of the eye-popping number.
Zelenskyy’s request laid bare the enormous task that Europe faces in helping a country under invasion without US contributions. It also helped revive the push to tap into the Russian assets, which supporters say would spare European taxpayers.
The Commission tried to use the assets last year through an inventive, multi-layered legal proposal that fell apart in December at a make-or-break summit. The executive, which invested a great deal of political capital defending the scheme, met furious resistance from Belgium and strong reservations from Euroclear.
“We left it in December at a very important discussion at the European Council. We never said that it was out of the table. It remains there as a tool,” Pinho said.
The Commission, she added, needs to gauge Ukraine’s additional financial needs “before we can speak of concrete possible tools to address them”.
Separately, Economy Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis told Euronews that his services were ready to “re-engage” on the assets and “help find a way forward”.
But he stopped short of committing to a new legal text, noting the Commission would wait for guarantees that an “agreement can be reached among member states”.
Belgium has already said its objections had not “magically disappeared”. Meanwhile, Euroclear is battling a legal challenge from the Russian Central Bank.