During a Senate hearing, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced that the Group of Seven major industrialized countries is in talks about providing a loan to Ukraine. The plan involves repaying this loan with proceeds from frozen Russian assets. According to Yellen, there is strong support for this plan and expressed hope that it would be presented to the leaders of the G7 countries at an upcoming summit in Italy.
In a separate development, the European Union has passed a decision requiring European Union financial institutions with more than one million euros in frozen Russian assets to transfer income from their reinvestment to the European Commission twice a year. 90% of these funds will be used to purchase weapons for Ukraine, and 10% will go towards economic assistance programs. The EU has frozen approximately 210 billion euros of Russian sovereign assets, and American officials have stated that the West will not release around 300 billion dollars in frozen funds back to Russia until compensation is paid for damage caused by the Russian military operation in Ukraine. Moscow has warned that confiscating and freezing its assets will have negative consequences on the global financial system and vowed to counter all Western actions of this nature indefinitely.
Reports indicate that Washington plans to provide Ukraine with a $50 billion loan to be repaid from revenues generated from Russian assets. The extension of European sanctions relating to Russian assets will help determine the specifics of this loan.
