• T00l_shed@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    That is a valid point. I wasn’t thinking about the rebuilding post war bit. Doesn’t the US have its own stash of Russian money. It can send to Ukraine for rebuilding?

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      4 months ago

      Probably. The US did freeze some. I don’t know whether the thing is being collectively-handled or on a per-country basis.

      kagis

      It sounds like there is some level of collective-decision-making involving both, and that more of the funds are frozen by Europe than the US.

      reads further

      This talks about both that and reconstruction costs:

      https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/how-frozen-russian-assets-could-pay-rebuilding-ukraine

      A recent assessment from the European Commission, the Government of Ukraine, the World Bank, and the United Nations estimated that at the one-year mark of the invasion, rebuilding Ukraine would cost $411 billion, with aid coming in from both the public and private sectors. This is more than double the size of Ukraine’s pre-invasion economy. The government says it needs some $14 billion to fund critical infrastructure projects in this year alone.

      So I’d guess that if anything, the number is higher now, if that represented damage at the one-year mark.

      The governments of the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the European Commission seized roughly $300 billion in Russian central bank assets not long after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, an extraordinary sum totaling about half of Russia’s foreign reserves at the time. Most of this money—more than $200 billion—is frozen in European accounts. These governments have also seized tens of billions of dollars in assets belonging to Russian oligarchs and private entities.

      So at least two-thirds of it was frozen by European governments. If they take different routes, whatever the Europe does – if it does one thing – will probably be where the larger portion of the funds go.