Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zezanamunshank and Jack Smith.

Today's subjects are asset sieges, especially the planned seizures of Russian reserve assets. Having sequestered them,

there's no debate to actually take them away and use them for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

And our second subject is de-globalization.

Let's start with asset sieges.

Zuzana, you've written about the story this week.

What is going on and what do we think is likely to happen?

Yeah, I mean, there are two debates going on in the EU.

The Commission came out with a proposal first to define circumventing sanctions as a common crime.

It's already a crime in 12 member states and another, I think, 13.

It is an offence, either administrative or

criminal offense. So we still have no kind of common definition of what it is. In parallel,

they're also working on the seizure or confiscation of assets that are from individuals that are circumventing these sanctions.

So this is a particular case that would actually target more, the oligarchs, or everyone who's

doing business and circumvent those sanctions.

But then there's also the debate about sequesting or using the funds that we actually sequestered before, which are the currency reserves.

And these are belong to the state, which is a totally different matter.

I mean, the US has this debate, the legal debate, about you can sequest properties.

You can sequest certain things, but you actually can't really

sequest money because there is sort of, it's kind of a fluid. And also the difference between

the state on the one hand and private individuals on the other. So how are we going to do that?

And how is this legal possible? I mean, the US did it in the past. They did that with Afghanistan,

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