Member-only story
Russia Is Suing Europe to Get Its Own Money Back
Three years after Brussels froze $230 billion of Russia’s foreign reserves, Moscow’s central bank has taken its case to the same Luxembourg court that will help decide whether Europe can ever spend the money on Ukraine — and the one EU country holding most of it, Belgium, is threatening to sink the whole plan a second time.
Junaid Suhais
THE BOTTOM LINE
Ukraine burned through its 2026 defense budget faster than European donors expected and is now $27 billion short for the year, reopening a fight the EU thought it had shelved when leaders abandoned a plan to lend Ukraine money backed by frozen Russian assets in December 2025 in favor of ordinary joint borrowing. That fallback loan is proving too small too fast, so the European Commission is back with a new draft of the same “reparations loan” idea, and Belgium — which hosts roughly €185–193 billion of the roughly €210 billion in immobilized Russian central-bank reserves, mostly through the settlement house Euroclear — still hasn’t signed off. Complicating matters further, Russia’s central bank has now sued the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg seeking to annul the freeze and, according to reporting on a related Moscow court filing, roughly $230 billion in damages from Euroclear. EU leaders are set to take up the financing question again at a summit on…
