The economic lifeline is expected to be disbursed by the end of the year.
The Group of 7 nations will announce on Wednesday that it has finalized plans to give Ukraine a $50 billion loan using Russia’s frozen central bank assets, according to a White House official.
The loan represents an extraordinary maneuver by Western nations to essentially force Russia to pay for the damage it is inflicting on Ukraine through a war that shows no sign of ending.
“Never before has a multilateral coalition frozen the assets of an aggressor country and then harnessed the value of those assets to fund the defense of the aggrieved party,” Daleep Singh, the White House’s deputy national security adviser for international economics, said on Wednesday.
The announcement comes after months of debate and negotiation among policymakers in the United States and Europe over how they could use $300 billion of frozen Russian central bank assets to support Ukraine.
The United States and the European Union enacted sanctions to freeze Russia’s central bank assets, most of which are held in Europe, after its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. As the war dragged on, officials in the United States pushed for the funds to be seized and given directly to Ukraine to aid in its economic recovery.
European officials had concerns about the lawfulness of such a move, however, and both sides eventually agreed over the summer that they would use the interest that the assets were earning to back a $50 billion loan.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
