The Biden administration is weighing options for directing tens of billions of dollars in frozen Russian government assets in the United States to the rebuilding of Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Thursday.
To do so, however, will likely take an act of Congress and could pose risks to U.S. taxpayers in the long run.
The $33 billion emergency spending request for Ukraine the White House sent to Congress on Thursday includes a proposal for “legislation to streamline the process to recoup proceeds from seized and forfeited assets and use them to remediate the harm caused in Ukraine,” according to a White House fact sheet.
At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Thursday, Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., asked Blinken if that legislative proposal would “apply to state assets, for example, the much larger amount of money that has been frozen around the world belonging to the Russian Central Bank?”
Blinken responded that “we’ve asked our own lawyers to look at … what authorities would be needed potentially to seize those [Russian government] assets, but not only to seize them but to use them” to rebuild Ukraine.
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