It was just another day of bungling in Brussels.
All European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wanted to do this morning was to justify stealing Russia’s funds. The EU and friends had blocked Russia’s Central Bank from accessing their own $310 billion of reserves, and had frozen another $20 billion in assets of private Russian individuals. So, in order to justify a seizure of the funds, apparently it just made sense for her to say that Ukraine had lost more than 100,000 personnel in the conflict with Russia.
However Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy evidently wasn’t fully on board with the sales pitch. He has repeatedly assured Ukrainians that ten Russians are dying for each Ukrainian—so, von der Leyen’s figure would mean that Zelenskyy would have to claim a million Russian combatants had died. Regardless, Kiev reacted immediately. Zelenskyy’s spokesman Sergey Nikoforov told media shortly afterwards that von der Leyen had no right to deal with such “sensitive” information. Rather, it should be released by no one but Zelenskyy, Commander in Chief Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, or Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. Otherwise, Nikoforov neither disputed nor confirmed the 100,000 figure.
