MOSCOW, January 31. /TASS/. Moscow will view the potential seizure of its assets by the European Union as an "act of trade war," Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing.

"We view such actions not only as open theft but also as literally a trade war and an escalation of the West’s economic aggression against our country," the diplomat said in response to a question about the potential reinvestment of Russia’s assets frozen by the EU. "Any attempts to seize our country’s assets would be a blatant violation of international law as no one questions or can question their legality," Zakharova added.

According to her, the EU realizes that Moscow will give an extremely harsh response to any possible seizure of its frozen assets.

"It is a very tempting idea for the EU to use the Russian assets to plug the hole [in the budget]. The possible consequences are the only thing keeping them from taking the final step. They can see that we are responding and this is discouraging them, to put it mildly, and they realize that there will be an extremely harsh response," the diplomat pointed out.

On January 29, European Union envoys approved in principle the European Commission’s initiative to use the profits from reinvesting Russia’s frozen assets "to support Ukraine’s reconstruction."

In December, the European Commission submitted a directive for approval to the Council of the EU, which includes a commitment to transfer these profits to a special bank account in the first step of a process to seize revenues from reinvested Russian assets. A nearly 100% European tax is expected to be applied to the money in the future. The plan is to transfer the tax revenue directly to the EU budget. This is the way funds are supposed to be seized in order to be used later at the discretion of the European Commission, particularly for funding support programs for Ukraine. The directive does not provide for the seizure of the Russian assets themselves at this point.

Russia’s sovereign assets frozen in the EU currently stand at about 200 bln euros.