Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me I'm Zanne Munchang and Jacksmith.

Today we'll talk about the asset sequestration scheme, as I call it, or the reparation loan to Ukraine as it is officially called.

And we want to talk about where we are, what obstacles this scheme has met, and what options there are to go forward.

We will also talk about the ban on Russian gas, whether this ban will last and where this will land us in if and when there is a peace deal what will

happen to this ban and other sanctions. Let us start our discussion with the sequestration

issue. I've been following this debate for a while and it started off as a general, let's use the Russian assets, kind of talk, and the people who proposed it never looked at the very complex legal issues that this involved.

The money, most of the Russian money is held in a Belgian depository called Euroclear.

Some of it is also in various member states and banks, but about a short of a 200 billion

of it lies at Euroclear in Belgium.

So Belgium is the country most exposed to the situation.

And Belgium has said it will not support the scheme.

The Prime Minister, Bart de V Weva said that Belgium would carry enormous risk if the scheme were agreed.

What the scheme is is significantly more sophisticated at this current point than the original ideas of just grabbing the Russian money and giving it to Ukraine.

Because that would be sequestration, just taking the money.

You could just call it, you can use other names for this.

But let's call it sequestration.

That would have been illegal under international law.

Russia could have sued the EU, and it would almost surely have won the case.

So the general predisposition towards just taking the money was broadly based on the lack of information about complex legal issues of international law.

So what happened is that the EU Commission, with the help of some international

lawyers, devised a scheme to circumvent the problem. Now the problem arises legally because

Euroclear is a massive company. If you're looking at, I think the balance sheet of Euroclear

...