Ukraine Receives First Installment from Frozen Russian Assets
![]() |
Ukraine Gets First Funds from Frozen Russian Assets |
Ukrainian President Denis Shmigal announced Tuesday that the first $1 billion of a $20 billion U.S. loan backed by seized Russian assets has been paid to Kiev. Russia has vowed to take action against “theft”.
It comes two weeks after the U.S. Treasury Department issued a $20 billion loan to the World Bank for Ukraine. The European Union has pledged an additional $20 billion to the fund, while G-7 countries Britain, Japan and Canada will add another $10 billion, for a total of about $50 billion that Ukraine is supposed to pay over 40 years in.
The debt is financed by interest earned on hard Russian government assets. In February 2022, the United States and its allies suspended an estimate of about $300 billion in assets for the Russian central bank as the conflict in Ukraine escalated
“We expect all the assets of sovereign Russia to be confiscated and used to rebuild Ukraine,” Schmigal wrote in a post to X .
Ukraine’s government, military and public sector have been entirely dependent on foreign aid since 2022, and the cost of maintaining conflict with Russia has strained the country’s economy Last month, Ukraine’s leader Vladimir Zelensky signed next year’s budget into law. It would generate $49 billion in revenue and spend $87 billion, for a total deficit of $37 billion.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that seizing Russian assets would undermine global confidence in the US. and among its allies, while the Kremlin repeatedly denounced asset freezing as “theft”, the use of this money would be illegal and said it set a dangerous precedent.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that Moscow's intervention in the seizure of assets would involve legal interference.