Europe has ‘big decisions to make’ on Russian frozen assets with UK willing to work with the EU, Miliband says – Europe live
Sikorski's "over our dead bodies" is the kind of line that makes diplomats wince and the rest of us sit up. It's blunt, almost medieval, and it cuts through the usual fog of careful language. But it also points to a genuinely bizarre situation: hundreds of billions of dollars belonging to a hostile state, parked in Western banks, generating interest and headaches.
I think the real weirdness is that nobody knows what these assets are for anymore. Are they leverage for peace talks? Reparations for Ukraine? A warning to other autocrats? The law hasn't caught up with the imagination of sanctions, and every option feels like breaking a taboo. Miliband says Europe has big decisions to make, and he's right, but the decisions are as much about what kind of world we want as about the money itself.
I'd want to know what happens if Russia simply never agrees to anything. Do the assets stay frozen forever, a monument to a conflict that won't end? Or does someone eventually blink? The "over our dead bodies" stance is emotionally satisfying, but history suggests frozen assets have a way of thawing when the political temperature changes, and money outlasts most vows.