According to the Financial Times, the United States has floated several ways to release Russia’s roughly $300 billion in frozen sovereign assets as part of a comprehensive peace deal. The paper reported this on Oct. 14, citing four people familiar with the matter. One option would move part of the funds into a special-purpose vehicle overseen by Washington. The proposals were raised at a meeting in Miami attended by officials from Ukraine, France, Germany, the U.K., the EU, and NATO.
A U.S. official told the newspaper that Washington had also asked Kiev for plans on how it would spend potential reconstruction funds. The U.S. also asked Kiev to work with the World Bank on curbing corruption and introducing financial accountability measures. Kiev’s European backers, however, rejected the initiative and refused to give up control of the assets. According to the FT, any release would require unanimous approval from all 27 EU member states. The proposal reportedly caught both the European delegations and Kiev off guard, leaving some questioning Washington’s intentions. “They [the U.S. representatives—ed.] were told that this was just simply not going to happen,” another source told the paper.
Publicly, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz ruled out any compromise, insisting that the assets “should remain frozen in Europe. This is our business and we are deciding over it,” reported Reuters. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski was more blunt, saying the funds could be returned to Russia only “over our dead bodies.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow had no information about the reported U.S. initiative. “We know nothing about this. These are the issues on the agenda of the dialogue between the Americans and Europeans, as stated in media reports…. We don’t know how reliable these reports are,” he said Oct. 15, reported TASS. As far as Europe’s response, Peskov was clear: “We continue to see a destructive position on the part of European countries. They not only did not welcome this [Trump’s diesel] deal, they subjected it to rather harsh criticism—both personally US President Donald Trump and similar decisions by the American administration.”
Separately, Reuters, citing a U.S. official, reported that Washington is considering easing sanctions on some vessels in the so-called “shadow fleet” in order to bring down record freight rates.
