“Without money there is no war machine”. Minister Kaag of Finance sees this as the main goal of the package to tackle Russian finances. The EU, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom became yesterday agree to expel a number of Russian banks from the international payment system Swift and freeze the assets of the Russian central bank.
Kaag thinks the Russians might be able to hold out for a while. “But anything you can do to slow it down or make it impossible, you should do it now,” she says.
The finance minister sees the closing of Russian banks from Swift as an important step in making it “difficult if not impossible for Russians to move around in payments”. The cabinet hopes that the EU will eventually agree on the decoupling of all Russian banks from Swift.
Collective welfare loss
According to Kaag, it is inevitable that the economy of the Netherlands and other European countries will also be affected by the sanctions or by possible Russian countermeasures. But she thinks “the Dutch and the rest of Europe really do feel that this is about something much bigger: peace, security and democracy.”
She speaks of “collective loss of wealth”. The cabinet would like to see how that can be “silenced, especially for the people who are already unable to make ends meet”. But it does not yet have any concrete measures in store for this.
Large-scale investments
Developments in Ukraine are also reviving the discussion in the Netherlands as to whether the defense budget should not be increased significantly. It has been agreed in the coalition agreement that an extra 3 billion euros will go to defence.
German Chancellor Scholz made Today even announced that he wants to allocate an extra 100 billion euros to modernize the army. When asked whether more is needed in the Netherlands, Kaag answers that the coalition is already investing “large-scale” in defence.
But she also says that it is a very important discussion: “This is a turning point in European history. When it matters, we have to be able to act and that requires large-scale investment. Security has no price for the democratic legal order.”
Tomorrow the House of Representatives will debate the developments in Ukraine.
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