US wants to confiscate frozen Russian Central Bank assets to rebuild Ukraine

Joel Gehrke - 28 April 2022

U.S. officials may move to confiscate hundreds of billions of dollars from the Russian Central Bank’s frozen accounts overseas in order to deploy the Russian assets to rebuild Ukraine after the war.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 28, 2022, to review the U.S. Department of State’s foreign policy priorities and fiscal year 2023 budget request.
© Carolyn Kaster/AP

Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 28, 2022, to review the U.S. Department of State’s foreign policy priorities and fiscal year 2023 budget request.

Such an initiative would expand a narrower proposal to use the wealth of the oligarchs closest to Russian President Vladimir Putin to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, which has endured brutal attacks on key cities over the last several weeks. President Joe Biden touted the idea of using “the oligarchs’ assets ... directly to remedy the harm Russia caused” earlier Thursday, spurring Rep. Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat, to ask if the administration wants to target Russian “state assets” vulnerable to seizure for the same purpose.

“In short, yes,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken replied during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Thursday afternoon. “We've asked our own lawyers to look at ... what authorities would be needed, potentially, to seize those assets — but not only to seize them, but to use them” for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

U.S. officials have orchestrated a major attack on the Russian economy in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to overthrow the Ukrainian government by coordinating the freezing of accounts subject to the jurisdiction of allied governments. That concerted effort deprived the Russian government of access to a reported $284 billion, roughly half of the money that Russian Central Bank technocrats had hoped to use to insulate the Russian economy against economic sanctions in such a crisis.

“We should be using the wealth that built the Putin regime to rebuild the country that Putin is destroying,” Malinowski told Blinken.

More than 400 House lawmakers voted Wednesday evening to pass a bill co- authored by Malinowski and Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, to “encourage” Biden’s administration to sell off high-value assets owned by sanctioned oligarchs and use the proceeds “to benefit the Ukrainian people, through the provision of military and humanitarian assistance, post-conflict reconstruction, and technology to ensure the free flow of information in Ukraine.”

Biden’s team included a similar idea in a new legislative proposal that requests additional funding from Congress, as well as legal authority to make use of the sanctioned Russian oligarchs’ possessions.

“We look forward to working with Congress on this,” a senior administration official told reporters earlier Thursday. “And as you know, the United States has already been working with allies and partners to track down assets all over the world. For example, Treasury has sanctioned and blocked vessels and aircraft worth over a billion dollars, as well as frozen hundreds of millions of dollars of assets belonging to Russian elites in U.S. bank accounts. “