G-7 states want to give a loan of $ 50 billion to Ukraine

The group of seven major western industrialized nations provides the Ukraine According to the US, a loan of 50 billion dollars (about 46 billion euros) – for the indirect Russia should be paid. The loan is secured by interest income from frozen Russian funds. The partners had agreed on the details, a US government representative said on Wednesday. An official statement from the G-7 countries is expected this evening. This is about a loan that the G-7 states and representatives of the European Union agreed to at a summit in June. Recently, however, there were still a number of hurdles to overcome in the negotiations, especially regarding EU sanctions regulations.

The US government now confirmed that it had found a way to approve the loan without the EU having to change its sanctions rules. “We will continue to push for these changes to be made,” said a representative of the US government at the same time. The US wants to add $20 billion to the loan. The US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, announced this on Monday. German Finance Minister Christian Lindner also said in New York that the European Union wanted to contribute 18 billion euros. That’s also about $20 billion. The other ten billion dollars are to come from Great Britain, Japan and Canada.

Everything could fail as a result of the Hungarian blockade

The representative of the US government confirmed that there is burden sharing between the US and the EU. This means that “the same incentives exist to keep the assets immobile until they are fully repaid”. As part of the sanctions imposed by the EU against Russia, around 210 billion euros in Russian central bank assets have been frozen from February 2022. It is currently estimated that the future in extraordinary interest from this up to 2.5 to 3 billion euros per year. Most of these funds are located in the EU.

If Moscow regains access to the frozen EU funds before the loans are fully repaid, the EU and the other G-7 partners involved would have to take over repayment. This could happen if an EU state blocked the extension of Russian sanctions with a veto. So the government in Washington called on Brussels to change the rules of the EU sanctions to provide more security that the Russian money that has been designated for repaying the loans is still frozen. Currently, extending the EU freeze must be decided unanimously every six months. The US urges this date to be extended to three years. However, the EU country Hungary has so far refused to grant the necessary permission.