The European Commission’s idea amounts to serving and eating a goose that lays golden eggs, Belgian PM tells MPs before critical summit.
BRUSSELS — Europe would face the “ultimate geopolitical embarrassment” if leaders fail to strike a deal to finance Ukraine, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever told lawmakers in the country’s parliament ahead of Thursday’s crunch summit.
Belgium, the home of the Euroclear bank — which holds some €185 billion in immobilized Russian assets that the EU wants to use to finance Ukraine — has been a staunch opponent of using that money to help Kyiv.
Addressing Belgian MPs on Thursday morning, just before the start of a summit at which leaders will be racing against the clock to agree financing for Ukraine, De Wever again voiced fears that the idea is “questionable” under international law and risks undermining the trust of financial markets and the credibility of Euroclear.
Not for the first time, he described the windfall profits — which are used to support Ukraine — from the immobilized assets as golden eggs from a goose.
“Today, the plan is to serve that goose, to eat it,” he told MPs.
But if the other EU countries agree to fully share the risks and protect Belgium from potential Russian retaliation, “then we’ll all jump off that cliff together … and hope that the parachute will hold us,” De Wever said.
“We will do that, because the alternative — no solution, no financing for Ukraine, the country collapses — is the ultimate geopolitical embarrassment of Europe, which we will feel for decades to come,” he added.
De Wever said some would only be too happy if “Europe were completely torn apart … parting in utter chaos with no solution for Ukraine and with knives drawn,” without naming names. “It would be catastrophic.”
Thursday is, in De Wever’s own words, “a pretty special day.”
Not satisfied with the offers
On Thursday morning, De Wever repeated Belgium’s conditions for supporting the reparations loan, including liquidity guarantees, protection against countermeasures and shared risks. “To date, I haven’t seen a single text that meets those conditions,” he said.
But De Wever told MPs that he believed serious consideration of alternatives had been wiped off the table when Germany — very publicly — threw its weight behind the reparations loan plan.
In resisting mounting pressure to agree to the reparations loan, Belgium is up against countries such as Germany, Poland and the Baltic and Nordic nations, which are staunch backers of the idea. De Wever described them as a “large bloc and a powerful bloc, and the [European] Commission leans that way, too.”
But Belgium isn’t totally isolated, as Italy, Bulgaria and Malta have also signaled their opposition to use of the frozen Russian assets.
“The challenge later today will be to see: What does Europe say?” De Wever said.