Spanish
Although the Community Executive and the majority of the Twenty-Seven considered that the "repair loan" financed with frozen Russian assets was the best option to support Kiev, the frontal opposition of Belgium, which houses the majority of those assets in the EU, and the rejection of the European Central Bank to act as guarantor of the credit have led Brussels to consider two possibilities.
"The message to Russia is that the repair loan or EU borrowing increases the cost of the war for Russia and invites it to come to the negotiating table to finally find peace," said the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, at a press conference.You can also read: Rebelo de Sousa will be discharged in hours and will visit Spain in February
The proposed initiatives would allow the EU to cover around 90 billion euros of the almost 136 billion that Ukraine will need in financial and military aid between 2026 and 2027, according to IMF calculations, while the rest should be provided by international partners, von der Leyen explained at a press conference. The European Commission has opted for two of the three options it had consulted with the Member States, discarding the bilateral subsidies that would have required each country to go to the markets on its own.On the one hand, the Community Executive proposes a repair loan financed with the cash balances generated by the assets of the Central Bank of Russia immobilized in the EU by the sanctions, some 210,000 million euros, of which the majority (some 185,000 million) are deposited in the Belgian firm Euroclear.
This would be fed by the assets deposited in all EU financial institutions, as Belgium had demanded. On the other hand, it proposes that the European Commission go to the debt markets to raise funding with the backing of the so-called "margin" of the Community budget and transfer the funds in the form of credit to Kyiv, in line with the mechanism used to support Kyiv since the beginning of the invasion in 2022. The proposals, the Community Executive indicated, are accompanied by "safeguards" to protect member states and financial institutions holding the assets from possible "retaliatory measures within Russia, and illegal expropriations outside Russia, especially in jurisdictions sympathetic to Russia". Furthermore, it foresees a "solidarity mechanism" to ensure that the financial risk of the loan is assumed collectively, firstly with guarantees that all Member States will have to provide and, ultimately, by the EU budget. "We want to ensure that all member states, and specifically Belgium, are sure that we will share the burden fairly," said von der Leyen, who assured that "almost all" the demands made by the country have been taken into account. Belgium had demanded the inclusion of all frozen assets in the EU in the loan and a system of collective guarantees against possible reprisals from Moscow. Its prime minister, Bart de Wever, increased his criticism in the last week of this option, assuring that it would make it difficult to reach a peace agreement in Ukraine and that it would generate problems in the financial markets by being perceived as a confiscation. The European Commissioner for Economy, Valdis Dombrovskis, assured that the proposed safeguards "would cover the unlikely scenario" that the EU has to pay without Moscow having paid war reparations or if a State is forced to pay Moscow, although he stressed that "the risk of this happening is very low". EU leaders are called to decide on their future support for Ukraine at their summit on December 18 and 19.
