The finance ministers of the Group of Seven countries (G7) will support an EU plan to use the revenue from frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine, Reuters reported on May 16, citing an unnamed Italian treasury official.
The ministers are set to meet on May 24, where they will work out the details to come to a final decision before a summit in Italy in June.
Ukraine's Western partners and other allies froze around $300 billion in Russian assets at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Roughly two-thirds are held in the Belgium-based financial services company Euroclear.
While the U.S. proposed seizing Russian assets outright in accordance with their recently passed REPO act, the EU has been more hesitant, fearing legal and fiscal pitfalls of confiscation.
Instead, Brussels seeks to use windfall profits generated by the frozen assets and funnel them to Kyiv.
In March, the European Commission submitted a proposal on using 90% of the generated funds to purchase weapons for Ukraine and allocate the remaining 10% to the EU budget to support the country's defense industry.
The proposed measure would have allocated around 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) to Ukraine per year.
Ukraine's Justice Minister Denys Maliuska said that while it is a "good step," the figure is "almost nothing" in the context of the full-scale war.
It is unclear what the contribution from the G7 countries not in the EU- the U.K., Canada, Japan, and the U.S., would add to the $3.3 billion sum.
Andrii Borovyk
(Updated: )
