Revenge of the Kremlin
Putin allows confiscation of US assets in Russia
24.05.2024, 00:04
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In April, the House of Representatives in Washington voted to confiscate Russian assets. Now the Kremlin is reacting. President Putin approves a decree that makes the confiscation of US assets possible.
Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin has signed a decree to confiscate American assets in response to the seizure of Russian assets in the USA. This is intended to compensate for the damage caused by the unfriendly actions of the USA to the Russian Federation and the Central Bank of Russia, according to Putin’s decree published in Moscow. According to this decree, a court can confiscate assets of the USA and American citizens in Russia, for example in the form of stocks, shares in corporations and land rights.
A Russian rights holder can therefore go to court and have the violation of his right to property in the USA established, stating the amount of damage. The court can then use the Legal Commission for the Control of Foreign Investments to determine whether and how the damage can be compensated, it said. The government has four months to make the legal changes necessary to implement the decree.
The Kremlin had previously repeatedly warned against confiscating Russian state assets. America would have to answer for this if it actually came to that, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in April. Russia would respond in line with its own interests. The House of Representatives in Washington voted in April to confiscate frozen Russian assets.
The EU, Switzerland and other countries have also blocked Russian assets. The EU states recently decided to use the interest income from the Russian central bank’s assets frozen in the EU to finance military aid for Ukraine. This year alone, up to three billion euros are expected to be raised. According to the Commission, around 210 billion euros of the Russian central bank’s assets are frozen in the EU. However, the assets themselves have not yet been confiscated, partly because there are fears in the EU of possible Russian retaliation. Moscow had criticized the confiscation of the interest income as theft.