The European Commission reported that the EU has frozen more than €200 billion of Central Bank assets Such an obligation was introduced for them in the tenth package of sanctions. Ministry of Finance

More than €200 billion ($215 billion) of assets of the Russian Central Bank are blocked in the EU countries. This was announced by the representative of the European Commission Christian Wiegand, reports BLOOMBERG .

EU countries reported new data in connection with the tenth package of sanctions, which was adopted on February 25. In particular, banks were obliged to provide information on the frozen assets of the Russian Central Bank.

As Wiegand noted, the EU is studying the possibilities of using the frozen funds in the interests of Ukraine.

In March last year, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that due to the sanctions of the European Union, the United States and other countries, Russia has lost access to almost half of its gold and foreign exchange reserves. As a result , Moscow cannot use about $300 billion out of about $640 billion, he said.

There have been repeated calls in the West and in Kyiv to use frozen Russian assets to rebuild Ukraine. The HEAD of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, confirmed that the goal of the EC is not to freeze, but to confiscate these funds. However, European norms only allow freezing, so Brussels is working on an appropriate legal framework, she said.

In the tenth package of sanctions against Russia, the EU Council included an obligation for banks to report on possible assets of the Bank of Russia that are at their disposal. As part of the new package of anti-Russian restrictions announced on May 19, the US authorities followed the example of the Europeans: the US Treasury has established an obligation to report on the presence of assets of the Bank of Russia, the National Wealth Fund or the Russian Ministry of Finance at their disposal.

The Russian authorities consider blocking the assets of the Central Bank abroad illegal. “A lot of assets are now simply stolen by specific countries that belong to what we call the collective West, including our gold and foreign exchange reserves,” said presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov . According to him, we are talking about nothing more than an "encroachment on state property."