On the face of it, funding Ukraine’s $400 billion-plus reconstruction should be a simple matter of confiscating frozen Russian foreign reserves, which would nearly foot the bill. Not so fast, says Germany’s justice minister among others. Marco Buschmann tells the FT repurposing the funds is “legally unworkable”, while another German official says it would open a can of worms including Polish claims on German funds to help pay for the destruction left by World War Two. Officials in Kyiv have suggested using funds accrued by custodians of the frozen Russian reserves, which they reckon could amount to $3 billion a year. One country that has passed legislation allowing the seizure and forfeiture of Russian assets is Canada. No surprise, perhaps, given its finance minister and former foreign minister is Chrystia Freeland, a former FT Moscow correspondent and author of the seminal Sale of the Century, on the original theft of Russian assets by Russian oligarchs.
