Tag: Geopolitics

by Amal Zadok

Europe’s decision to seize and weaponise frozen Russian state assets marks a dangerous escalation: a last tantrum of a decadent elite that prefers to gamble with international law and Europe’s own future rather than accept strategic defeat and negotiate peace. Presenting this as “justice” or “reparations for Ukraine” hides a more prosaic reality: the European gangster wants those billions to plug fiscal holes, prop up a failing war effort, and delay the reckoning with its own political and economic suicide.

The gangster move: stealing the frozen billions

The plan to strip Russia of hundreds of billions in frozen reserves is the logical culmination of a policy that has already burned Europe’s cheap energy, industrial base, and social model on the altar of war. After sacrificing affordable Russian gas and triggering deindustrialisation and inflation, EU elites now eye Moscow’s confiscated assets as a new “magic fund” to sustain a war they cannot win and a fiscal model they can no longer finance from a shrinking tax base.

This is framed as moral duty—“Russia must pay”—but the context betrays the real motive. Europe has already diverted enormous sums of public money to arm Kyiv while hospitals close, schools crumble, and poverty indices climb; the assets grab offers a way to extend this war spending without openly telling citizens they will lose even more welfare and rights. The political clica wants to swap domestic social anger for geopolitical banditry, trading bread and pensions for a one‑off financial heist.

Belgium: pressure on the weak link

Belgium sits at the centre of this scheme because Euroclear holds a massive chunk of the immobilised Russian reserves, turning Brussels into the vault the clica now wants to crack open. The same Europe that chants about “rule of law” is pressuring a small member state to accept a precedent that would have been unthinkable even at the height of the Cold War: openly confiscating another state’s reserves not as part of a peace settlement, but to keep shovelling weapons into an open‑ended proxy war.

This pressure takes several forms.

•Legal sophistry: relabelling seizure as “windfall profits,” “guarantees,” or “collateral,” while the substance is still the same—appropriating Russian wealth to fund war.

•Political blackmail: warning Belgium that refusing the scheme would mean “abandoning Ukraine” or undermining European unity, turning a technical custody issue into a loyalty test.

•Financial intimidation: hinting that Belgium’s role as a Euroclear hub could be questioned if it does not align with Washington and Brussels’ strategy.

If Belgium capitulates, the message to the world is simple: deposits and reserves in Europe are safe only until the next geopolitical hysteria.

Repercussions from Russia: from retaliation to systemic fracture

For Russia, this move crosses a line between sanctions and outright theft. Moscow will not respond only with diplomatic protests; it has tools—economic, legal, and strategic—that will turn this European tantrum into a long‑term blowback.

Likely responses include:

•Legal counter‑claims and mirror seizures: Russia can expropriate European assets on its territory, nullify Western intellectual property, and seize physical infrastructure and investments as “compensation.”

•Deepened de‑dollarisation and de‑euroisation: the signal to the Global South is devastating—Western currencies and jurisdictions are now weaponised, not neutral. This accelerates the creation of alternative payment systems, BRICS mechanisms, and commodity‑based settlement that permanently erode Europe’s financial relevance.

•Strategic hardening: confiscation removes incentives for compromise. If Russia knows its reserves are gone for good, it has fewer reasons to agree to any settlement framed on Western terms, entrenching a cold war that Europe is far less equipped to sustain than Washington.

In short, the “free money” Europe hopes to extract from Russian reserves will be repaid with isolation from emerging financial architectures, lost markets, and a Russia firmly anchored in a non‑Western bloc that no longer trusts European signatures or banks.

Europe’s attempt to formalise this confiscation also carries the logic and symbolism of a declaration of war, even if it hides behind legal euphemisms and technocratic language. 

Treating the central bank reserves of a nuclear‑armed state as spoils to be carved up for weapons and reconstruction funds signals that the EU no longer recognises Russia as a legitimate counterpart in the international system, but as a defeated enemy to be looted.

In strategic terms, this is indistinguishable from economic total war, because it erases the boundary between temporary sanctions and permanent dispossession.

Such a move hardens threat perceptions in Moscow to an unprecedented degree, reinforcing the narrative that the West seeks not negotiation or “behaviour change” but Russia’s strategic humiliation and eventual fragmentation. 

If Russian leaders conclude that no future compromise can restore their assets, security, or status, they are incentivised to escalate horizontally—cyber, space, infrastructure, and asymmetric responses—rather than de‑escalate. 

What Europe reads as financial cleverness, Russia reads as confirmation that the conflict is existential and must be met with long‑term, system‑level counter‑measures.

By crossing this Rubicon, Europe not only undermines its own legal foundations but also normalises the idea that financial warfare can be escalated indefinitely without triggering wider conflict—a dangerous illusion. 

Once the taboo on sovereign asset seizure is broken, every further crisis will tempt policymakers to “solve” political problems with new expropriations, pushing great‑power relations ever closer to open confrontation. 

In this sense, the theft of Russian reserves is not just a tantrum; it is the codification of permanent economic war and, in substance, a de facto declaration of war against Russia, with all the risks of miscalculation, retaliation, and eventual military escalation that such a doctrine entails.

The internal cost: Europe against its own citizens

The gangster heist is not just an act against Russia; it is an act against Europeans themselves. By normalising confiscation of sovereign assets and emergency war financing, the same political clica also normalises permanent emergency at home—more censorship, less judicial independence, more police, and fewer social rights.

The trajectory is already visible:

•Sanctions and energy rupture triggered deindustrialisation, capital flight, and a collapse of the tax base that once funded Europe’s welfare states.

•The Ukraine war became the justification to divert billions from schools, hospitals, and pensions into weapons, while dissenters were smeared as traitors or agents of Moscow.

•Digital censorship regimes, “disinformation” laws, and emergency decrees hollowed out democratic debate and press freedom, recreating a digitalised version of Soviet‑style control.

Using Russian money to keep this machinery going compounds the moral and legal rot. It signals that the war economy and repression must continue at any cost, because the elites have staked not just political capital but now the credibility of the entire European financial system on a conflict that has no realistic path to victory.

Europe’s strategic suicide: from unipolar denial to open piracy

Confiscating Russian reserves is also a symptom of a deeper pathology: Europe’s refusal to accept a multipolar world and its subservience to US strategic dictates. Instead of adapting to a reality where Russia, China, and the Global South cannot be coerced into obedience, Europe doubles down on unipolar fantasies—NATO expansion, economic warfare, ideological crusades—and then, when the costs become unbearable, resorts to financial piracy to prolong the illusion.

The long‑term consequences are stark:

•Trust collapse: states that watched Libya’s reserves frozen and now see Russia’s formally confiscated will regard Western custody as a trap, not a service.

•Loss of strategic autonomy: as Europe burns bridges to Eurasia, it locks itself into dependency on American energy, arms, and financial architecture, becoming a semi‑sovereign periphery of Washington’s empire.

•Civilisational hollowing: the moral language of “rule of law,” “human rights,” and “democracy” becomes empty when the EU behaves like a cartel seizing assets to fund a proxy war, censors opposition, and militarises public life.

The irony is cruel: in the name of defending “European values” against Moscow, Europe is dismantling its welfare state, civil liberties, and credibility as a legal and financial safe haven.

Beyond the tantrum: the fork in the road

This last tantrum—the attempt to steal Russia’s frozen billions—is not a sign of strength but of exhaustion. It reveals elites trapped between a failed war strategy, a collapsing social contract, and a world that no longer tolerates Western impunity.

Europe now stands at a precipice where one decision can still change its fate: either reclaim the primacy of bread over bombs, law over looting, and peace over permanent mobilisation, or accept its mutation into a garrisoned, obedient frontier of a fading empire. 

If the frozen Russian billions are finally cracked open to feed the war machine, that act will not be a clever financial manoeuvre but the moment Europe openly chooses vassalage over sovereignty and plunder over principle. 

On that day, historians will not write that Europe defended its values; they will record that, for the price of one last stolen jackpot, a civilisation signed away its soul and marked, in its own hand, the date of its final moral and strategic surrender.

References

1.European Parliamentary Research Service. (2025, November 27). EU sanctions and Russia’s frozen assets (Study EXPO_STU(2025)754487). European Parliament.

2.European Parliamentary Research Service. (2025, September 7). Confiscation of immobilised Russian sovereign assets: State of play, arguments and scenarios (Briefing EPRS_BRI(2025)775908). European Parliament.

3.European Parliamentary Research Service. (2025, June 30). Immobilised Russian central bank assets (At a glance EPRS_ATA(2025)769514). European Parliament.

4.Reuters. (2025, December 2). EU proposes using frozen Russian assets or borrowing to raise €90 billion for Ukraine.

5.Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2025, December 3). EU proposes using frozen Russian assets as reparations loans for Ukraine.

6.Verfassungsblog. (2025, April 3). Frozen Russian state assets. Verfassungsblog on Constitutional Matters.

7.Council on Foreign Relations. (2025, November 19). How to use Russia’s frozen assets.

8.Reuters. (2025, December 3). Russia mocks EU deliberations on frozen assets, says seizure will prompt “harshest response”.

9.CNBC. (2025, December 4). Russia: Europe’s use of frozen assets could be justification for war.

10.Investing.com. (2025, December 4). Russia warns EU of “harsh response” over potential asset freezes.

11.Reuters. (2025, December 1). Top Russian banker says EU faces 50 years of litigation if it takes Russia’s frozen assets.

12.Big Europe. (2025, November 12). The poisoned chalice of Russia’s frozen assets.

13.Geopolitique.eu. (2023, February 22). Sanction. Confiscate. Compensate. How Russian money can be repurposed as reparations for Ukrainian victims.

14.Al Jazeera. (2025, December 2). Europe should seize Russia’s frozen assets now.

15.Reuters. (2025, October 2). How Europe wants to unlock Russia’s frozen cash for Ukraine.

16.CEPR. (2025, March). Seizing central bank assets?

©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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