Last night in Brussels, in a salomonic and contradictory decision, the EU Council decided to save the Russian assets frozen in European coffers and still try to save Ukraine, with a two-year contribution to its budget of 90 billion (about half of what Ursula Von Der Leyen considered necessary).

The opposition of countries officially allied with Moscow, such as Hungary and Slovakia, and also the opposition of countries such as Italy, worried about the consequences of this challenge to Moscow for Europe, weighed heavily. Perhaps retaliation on European companies in Russia. Certainly a reputational risk, though in anything but moral terms.

Russia’s asset-cannons

By confiscating the capital of a rogue state, the EU could appear in the eyes of other states of the same ilk (or institutions and companies connected to them) as a less reliable market, and a flight of capital, no matter whether dirty or clean, could have an effect on the European financial market and potentially on the very resilience of the euro.

Such criticism, however, also applies to the seizure (so-called ‘freezing’) of these funds, which the EU decided immediately after the start of the full-scale war in 2022 and which had no effect on European markets.

What made the discussion on this option grotesque, however, was thelegal opposition, so to speak, put forward by those who did not want to help Ukraine or who wanted to avoid upsetting Russia too much and ventured into casuistic, pathetic disquisitions, as if their concern was to prove themselves better than the bad enemy and rooted in an intransigent culture of law, whatever the cost, or even to end up being shamefully pursued by a bailiff, who would order them to return the ill-gotten gains.

The ‘usual’ double standards of Putin’s zouaves

The pundits on the possible ‘theft’ of 200 million Kremlin capital by the EU have never been so outraged by Russia’s kidnapping of 20,000 Ukrainian children (more fortunate, after all, than the thousands who have been killed or injured in bombings against civilian targets).
Of course, it is not surprising that the sensitivity to legal issues of Putin’s political zouaves – people like Salvini or Conte , for instance – matches that of their favourite.

It is more surprising (but not that surprising) that among all the other negotiationists and pacifists on the left and right, who are very offended by being called Putinites and who, on the contrary, flaunt a sorrowful solidarity for the tormented Ukraine, the fear of the consequences of the use of Russian assets is politically much stronger and more decisive than the fear of giving a piece of Europe to a man who kidnaps children, when he does not kill or cripple them by bombing kindergartens, gardens and children’s hospitals.

There will be no peace without the return of the abducted children

If you try to tell them that perhaps any peace agreement should start with the preventive return home of all these kidnapped children, who instead have literally disappeared from the chronicles of the war, they make Francesca Albanese ‘s face when you mention the Israeli hostages of Hamas.

They are not doing this because they do not grieve for the children, let me be clear, but because raising this issue means wanting to… continue the war, which in any case for the kidnapped children will continue until they return home, and will therefore continue even if the resistance of the Kremlin’s friends and non-enemies forces Europe to give up on Ukraine (prediction: it won’t happen) and gives Russia the ‘peace’ it wants.