WASHINGTON, April 17. /TASS/. The US administration is using new legislation recently passed by Congress to transfer certain assets seized from Russian businessmen for use in rebuilding Ukraine, US Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed on Tuesday.
"<...> we are exercising new authority granted by Congress to transfer certain assets that we have seized from Russian oligarchs for use in rebuilding Ukraine," he said at a press conference without going into details.
In turn, deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco noted at the same event that the United States will intensify efforts to freeze and seize Russian avoirs.
"We are dedicating more resources to ensuring accountability and to combating those that facilitate the Russian war machine," she said.
As the deputy attorney general claimed, "those new resources include prosecutors working with international partners on investigating war crimes" allegedly committed by Russia.
"And those resources include continued efforts to freeze and seize any Russian assets that we can under the authorities that we have," she noted without providing any details.
Last week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed that the "gangsterish practices" of the Western countries in relation to Russia’s assets cannot be wrapped up in the norms of international law, and all attempts to legitimize [such actions] are doomed to failure. Peskov said that that the Kremlin will be watching the West’s further steps.
On April 13, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland admitted that Washington was considering using the frozen assets of the Bank of Russia stored in accounts abroad to restore Ukraine. She also recalled that the US government has received a new authority to transfer funds confiscated from large Russian entrepreneurs to the restoration of Ukraine.
Earlier, the German newspaper Die Welt reported, citing an unpublished European Commission (EC) document, that EC experts had come to the conclusion that, from a legal point of view, the frozen assets of the Central Bank of Russia cannot simply be transferred to Ukraine, despite the political will of the European leadership, as the legal barriers to such a move are too high.
The EC has proposed investing the Central Bank of Russia’s frozen assets in European government bonds, and using the interest to pay Kiev. The EC estimates the yield on such bonds at 2.6% per year. The EU’s legal department has so far been unable to answer the question of what to do if the EU were to lose the invested funds due to a specific turn of events.