Understanding the conflict two years on.

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The United States is still pushing to seize outright all the frozen Russian Central Bank assets it can to help fund Ukraine, even as broader Ukraine funding remains blocked by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. But it is becoming clearer that in Europe, the only politically realistic approach to using Russian money to fund Ukraine is by tapping a much smaller windfall that amounts to about 1 percent of Moscow’s frozen funds.

The United States is still pushing to seize outright all the frozen Russian Central Bank assets it can to help fund Ukraine, even as broader Ukraine funding remains blocked by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. But it is becoming clearer that in Europe, the only politically realistic approach to using Russian money to fund Ukraine is by tapping a much smaller windfall that amounts to about 1 percent of Moscow’s frozen funds.

The big question is whether that relatively small amount can be squeezed even harder to provide a more substantial and ongoing funding stream for Ukraine, which is now worried less about postwar reconstruction than the grim situation of its ammo-starved army on the battlefield.

“There is a massive financing crisis. Europe and the West are not really addressing it,” said Timothy Ash, a sovereign strategist at RBC Bluebay Asset Management and a fellow at Chatham House, a U.K. think tank. He figures Ukraine needs about 100 billion euros a year to fight off the Russian invasion, and another 50 billion euros a year for reconstruction.

On paper, a big chunk of that money is theoretically available. There don’t appear to be any insurmountable legal obstacles to seizing the entirety of the roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian Central Bank assets held by Europe, the United States, and a handful of other countries........

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