Use frozen Russian assets to aid Ukraine, says EU’s top diplomat

Billions of Russian state funds frozen in the European Union should be used to aid Ukraine, the EU’s top diplomat has said.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security, told the Guardian and four other European newspapers that Ukraine had a legitimate claim for compensation and that Russian assets held in the EU were “a tool to pressure Russia”.

The EU has already begun skimming the profits off Russian assets held in the bloc for Ukraine, but has balked at seizing the entire sum (€210bn in the union) because of doubts about the legality of such a move. The EU holds more than two-thirds of Russia’s $300bn sovereign assets frozen by western allies after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Kallas, a lawyer who was Estonia’s prime minister until July, predicted that despite “sensitivities … we will get there one day”, in an intervention that raises pressure on European governments to reconsider the issue.

She suggested the Russian funds would help pay the bill for “all the damage that Russia has caused to Ukraine”.

“Better to have a small bird in your hand than a big bird on the roof,” she said. “So we have the small bird in our hand [the frozen assets] and this is the tool to also pressure Russia.”

Her proposal comes amid growing questions over how to fund Ukraine in the medium term and pay its colossal reconstruction bill. Donald Trump, who has derided US aid to Kyiv, will also return to the White House next year.

In her first sit-down interview with print media since starting her new role, Kallas said Europe needed to step up aid to Ukraine if the US withdrew funding.

She added that financial support for Ukraine “is not charity”, but in the interest of Europe and the US.

“If they [the US] reduce the aid, then we need to continue supporting Ukraine, because I’m worried about what happens if Russia wins. I think we will have more wars, bigger wars,” she said.

Aiding Ukraine was “investment” in “our own security” and global security, she said, citing the involvement of North Korean soldiers in Ukraine and Chinese military exercises in the South China Sea. “China is also learning from what Russia does.”

She was speaking in her office on the 12th floor of European Commission headquarters, where the bare walls and empty shelves testified to a heavy schedule in her first 11 days.

On her first day in the post, she went to Kyiv to meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said his country needed “diplomatic solutions”only when Russia was unable to launch further attacks.

This week Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said peace talks on Ukraine could start “in the winter” but Kallas would not be drawn on dates, observing: “Russia doesn’t want those negotiations.”

Asked about recent phone calls between Vladimir Putin and the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, on Wednesday, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, last month, she said: “They [Orbán and Scholz] are doing this for domestic purposes; so I wouldn’t do it, but this is not for me to criticise.”

Foreign ministers meeting on Monday, she said, would discuss whether there was “any added value” from such diplomacy.