On Thursday, 18 December, the European Council, the body formed by the 27 heads of state or government (along with presidents Costa and Von der Leyen), will have to take one of the most difficult foreign policy decisions in its history.

What are ‘frozen Russian assets’?

In the banks of European countries, there are EUR 210 billion that had been deposited there by the Russian central bank or private Russian citizens, and that have been frozen for almost four years due to sanctions .
Over 190 of these are in Belgium, in the Euroclear fund.

‘Frozen’ does not mean ‘expropriated’: in theory, once the war is over, they should be returned to their rightful owners, as happened in most wars of the past (including the one against Nazi Germany).

Those assets therefore remain in Europe, earning interest that Belgium and other states are collecting regularly, but it was always assumed that one day they would return to Russia.
The purpose of the sanctions was only to prevent that 210 billion from feeding Putin’s war machine for as long as the invasion of Ukraine lasted, but nothing more.

Ukraine one step away from the abyss

In recent weeks, however, the scenario has abruptly changed.

Ukraine, which for four years resisted the Russian advance by restricting it to the rubble of three or four smaller cities, finds itself less and less able to continue a lonely battle.

It has suffered extremely heavy material damage, losing power plants, factories, mines and oil platforms in the bombardment. It has suffered extremely heavy environmental damage, losing the Kakhovka water supply and up to a third of its arable land. It has suffered very heavy moral damage, with some estimates of 93,000 people maimed and over 10 million in need of psychological care.

These problems alone would not be enough to cause a collapse of the army at the front.
But there are two others that, unfortunately, appear insurmountable: the budget hole, with some 136 billion over the next two years that the Ukrainians do not know where to find, and the demographic crisis, which requires Zelensky to spare as many men of childbearing age from military service as possible.

The latter, in particular, is the real tragedy of today’s Ukraine: alongside the fight against corruption, it has been at the heart of the political confrontation in the country for four years. The army obviously disputes the presidential choices, arguing that fewer men under arms means less reinforcements and more risk of death for those they are fighting, in a vicious circle.

To make matters worse, since last January, cameTrump’s betrayal, with the consequent disengagement of the United States.
Nona Mikhelidze described the impact well in an article in the Foglio: financially, the Europeans have not at all filled the gap left by the Americans, so much so that in 2025 foreign aid to the aggrieved Ukraine was 43% less than in 2024.

The US continues, yes, to sell weapons – especially the invaluable Patriot anti-aircraft systems – and to share intelligence, but there is no telling how much longer they will do so.

Madama Europa and her decisions

Mind you, Russia has similar problems – including a predatory protector, Xi Jinping, who treats it in much the same way as Trump treats Ukraine, attracting the nickname ‘West Korea’ on social media.
But on the financial front it can count on an additional source of revenue, which is the sale of gas and oil. Moreover, being a dictatorship, it can sadly ignore the demographic bleeding caused by the war (almost a million fewer inhabitants a year between fallen soldiers, emigrants, immigrants who did not come and fewer births).

It is no coincidence that in the last few days words of discouragement are also being heard from Kiev’s historic supporters.
Leading the way, of course, is Italy, with Tajani postponing an arms purchase for Ukraine claiming it was ‘premature’.
But he was echoed by Finland’s Stubb, for whom ‘we must prepare ourselves for the fact that all the conditions for the just peace we have talked so much about for four years are unlikely to be achieved’.
The German foreign minister, Wadephul, announced that ‘Ukraine will have to make painful concessions: it will be a difficult path that will end in a referendum’ (a nonsense for anyone who knows a little about Ukrainians).
The only one not to be derailed is European High Representative Kaja Kallas, who had her mother and grandmother deported to Siberia by Stalin: today the US secretary of state refuses to speak to her because he finds her ‘irrational’.

Beyond the excesses of moody depression of one or the other leader, however, one fact remains: Ukraine, if it does not want to succumb, needs a quantum leap in European engagement, and it needs it now.
Either the Europeans will at least manage to solve its financial woes by the start of the new year, or the game will be lost.

Three options, none painless

But the options for sending 136 billion to Ukraine actually boil down to three.

The first is to tax European citizens more: a suicidal choice not only in terms of propaganda, but also economically. The major European countries are all grappling with a growing imbalance between wages and cost of living: some because of overly burdensome welfare spending (France and Spain), some because of self-defeating energy choices (Germany), some because of both (Italy). Add Trump’s tariffs, the Houthi attacks on the Suez Canal and the burdens of the Green Deal: everything is conceivable except new taxes.

The second option is to make common debt, as happened during the Covid. But we know that several northern states consider this an outrage against their sovereignty: if that loan is then used to save Ukrainian schoolgirls from missiles, instead of 80-year-old Dutch women from a virus, the outrage seems even more unbearable.

The last option is precisely to unfreeze Russian assets and transfer them to the Ukrainians, allowing them to continue their resistance at the expense of the enemy.
An unprecedented gesture, at the mere thought of which Belgian Prime Minister Van der Vewer rose up: ‘It would be a nice little story to take the money of the bad guy, Putin, and give it to the good guy, Ukraine. But stealing another country’s assets, its sovereign wealth, has never been done’. He added: ‘Come on, who really believes that Russia will lose in Ukraine? It is just a fairy tale and an illusion. Indeed, it is not even desirable for them to lose and for instability to spread to a country with nuclear weapons’.

It’s not like with the Mafia

If paternalistic concerns about instability in Russia after a possible defeat are an evergreen of Western governments, on other points Van der Vewer has his reasons.
Legally, Europe cannot act towards Russia as the state does towards the mafia, seizing its assets and giving them to a charity.
A possible court action by the Russians, if successful, would force Belgium to pay back within a week 190 billion, which is more than a third of its GDP.

Moreover, in the future, other countries might decide to deposit their capital in other more ‘reliable’ countries, which do not seize it overnight just because the owner has invaded nine regions of a neighbouring country and exterminated hundreds of thousands of civilians.

To the outward legal forcing is added the inward legal forcing. If the European Council, which decides by majority vote and not unanimously, decided on 18 December to confiscate Russian assets, would that decision be binding on a sovereign state like Belgium?
And if Belgium refused to obey, how would the rest of the Union react?
It is likely that, when the dispute reaches the desk of the European Court of Justice, the latter would rule in Belgium’s favour, ruling that the Union has exceeded its powers.

In short: seizing Russian assets and giving them to the Ukrainians is almost certainly unjust legally, but it is almost certainly right and necessary politically. What to do, then?
That is why the European Council’s decision is so difficult.

It is a question of deciding whether we are in such a state of emergency that we can defy some of the customs of law, or whether, on the contrary, respect for the law in all its parts is such an indispensable value and strategic priority that we can sacrifice the entire Ukrainian nation (and who knows how many other nations after it) to it.

The question is whether we Europeans are merely spectators at the window or whether we are an active participant in the conflict, which can seize Russian assets as Russia seized Ukrainian assets.

We ended up, in short, straight into the situation described by Machiavelli in the 18th chapter of The Prince, when he asked ‘In what way should princes observe the faith’, i.e. the given word.

The beast and the man

“You must therefore know”, wrote Machiavelli to Lorenzo il Giovane, “how there are two generations of fighting: one with laws, the other with forces. That first is of men; that second is of beasts; but because the first is often not enough, one must have recourse to the second.
Therefore it is necessary for a Prince to know how to use both beast and man well’.

But how can one tell if the time has come to ‘well use the beast’?

Contrary to the commonplace, Machiavelli was never a cynic: the point of his work was precisely to circumscribe the extreme cases in which a politician could resort to violence and deception, in a 16th century Italy where anyone used them all the time and without question.

And so, on keeping his word, he gave Lorenzo the Younger a golden rule: “A prudent lord cannot, nor should, observe faith when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise it are extinguished”.
Translated, promises are no longer valid if the context in which they were made is extinguished.

How much remains of the international economic and political context in which European states had committed themselves never to seize assets stored on their territory?
How much remains of the context in which the European Treaties were signed, stipulating that the Union would leave such a critical choice to the sovereign states?

Can we still afford the luxury of ‘being men’ and ‘fighting with laws’, or is it time to become ‘beasts’ and ‘fight with forces’?