31 sats \ 3 replies \ @arrivederci 17 Mar \ on: EU agrees to liquidate Russia's confiscated assets to finance supply of weapons econ
@TomK the submission headline you have used is not actually a good summary of the (badly written) Reuters article.
They have agreed to use profit (e.g. interest paid) from the frozen assets and not actually liquidate the confiscated assets. The article leads with this information :
but fails to properly draw out what this means in the article, as would be good journalistic practice, and thus allows confusion on what has actually happened from the reader.
What they are doing represents a significantly smaller step taken (but still a grossly stupid and criminal one) than actually liquidating the frozen assets. Euroclear, the authority that actually holds over 70% of the frozen assets, had previously given the ok for using the interest paid on the assets but is still, very strongly, warning against the liquidation, i.e. full seizing, of the assets. Because Euroclear recognises, correctly, that seizing the assets will have catastrophic consequences for Europe as a financial centre.
Next step will be confiscation as it is mentioned here in the WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europe-will-tap-frozen-russian-assets-for-ukraine-arms-germanys-scholz-says-659ed672
It's escalation step by step