On Nov. 4 EU financial officials failed to agree on a formula for stealing all or part of Russia’s frozen assets to pay for the Ukraine war. On Nov. 7 the EU finance ministers met and again failed, despite an EU Commission report issued for the occasion, which threatened that failure to steal at least $160 billion would mean EU countries would have to make interest payments of $6.5 billion per year,Financial Times reported.
Creative accounting acrobatics aside, “No matter how the scheme for expropriating Russian money is orchestrated, there is no legal way to do so,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared in an interview with RIA Novosti released Nov. 9. RT reported that Lavrov had added: “The cynicism with which the European Commission interprets the UN Charter and other international legal norms, including provisions on sovereign immunity and the inviolability of central bank assets, has long been unsurprising.” He said the efforts reflect the West’s “long-held colonial and pirate instincts” and amount to “outright deception and robbery.”
