Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever stubbornly refuses to go along with the latest absurd idea from the EU bureaucracy: seizing Russia’s assets in Belgium to offer them to Ukraine. Politico scolds him, claiming he is “harder to convince than Trump” (the ultimate embodiment of evil, apparently).
Confiscating Russia’s sovereign assets in Belgium would indeed be an act of sheer folly. Even during the Second World War, no such step was taken. After Pearl Harbor, for example, President Roosevelt froze Japanese assets — he did not steal them. Never in history have non-belligerent countries seized the central-bank assets of a belligerent state during wartime in order to finance the reconstruction of a third country (source).
- A Direct Violation of International Law
The United Nations Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States (Article 21) guarantees the protection of central bank assets when used for non-commercial purposes. Article 5 is unequivocal: “A State enjoys, for itself and its property, immunity from the jurisdiction of the courts of another State.”
The Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA) require that any “countermeasure” be proportionate, reversible, and aimed at resolving a dispute — not destroying an economy.
Finally, the aim has never truly been the “reconstruction of Ukraine,” despite the protestations of the pale apparatchiks in the Berlaymont — headquarters of Ms. von der Leyen’s European Commission. The actual objective is to fund Ukraine’s war effort. In plain terms: a de facto act of war by little Belgium against imperial Russia. Even the authors most favourable to confiscation acknowledge that such assets could only, under international law, be used for reconstruction — never to finance warfare (Csongor István Nagy, International Investment Law Enables the Use of Frozen Russian Assets to Compensate for War Damage in Ukraine, Harvard International Law Journal, 15 November 2023).
- The Mother of All Financial Crises
All international financial transactions rely on trust, since there is no sovereign arbiter above states. Shattering that trust would unleash a financial crisis that would devastate Europe and the global financial system. Europeans fail to grasp that between their current comfort and poverty lie merely two or three disastrous decisions — precisely the sort the EU excels at making. Our fellow citizens behave as though supermarket abundance were part of the laws of nature, an eternal constant. But when you’ve been living on credit for fifty years, caution is essential. Europe is a leaking financial submarine, and von der Leyen proposes that we throw the hatches wide open — apparently to “breathe easier.”
Every state on the planet would instantly understand that the theft of Russian assets paves the way for the theft of their own, under whatever pretext might be found. One can picture the delight of the Berlaymont’s creatures fantasising about seizing the assets of China, India, the United States, and others, in the name of “insufficient climate efforts,” for instance. Two hundred countries, two hundred portfolios — a banquet for crazed bureaucrats.
The BRICS central banks would pull their reserves out of Western institutions within a week. The euro would become toxic as a reserve currency, and would collapse — for it is not backed by genuine industrial might, but merely by the fading remnants of the rule of law.
Europe is already financially drained after its economic suicide, pompously named the “Green Deal.” Desperate to keep their crumbling system alive a few months more, the EU’s bureaucrats are ready to seize anything within reach. But the rest of the world is not blind. It sees. It understands.
Hellbound and Down 