Terry Glavin: Trump has already decided Russia is the winner of the war |
For the White House, sanctions are yesterday's news
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It was an ignominious end to a squalid year for the “rules based” world order. It came in the last days of the second decade of democracy’s global retreat from the advances of Russia, China and the rest of the police-state bloc in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
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It didn’t come with a bang but with a whimper last week when a tangle of technocratic complexities and cowardice confounded the European Union’s effort to harness roughly $200 billion in frozen Russian assets for a “reparations loan” to Ukraine.
A middling compromise was reached instead. The initial plan was to secure Russia’s immobilized sovereign wealth funds from the Belgian securities repository Euroclear as the basis for a loan to Ukraine that Moscow would be eventually required to pay. Instead, EU member states ending up voting to borrow roughly $105 billion on their own to help Ukrainians defend their besieged republic for another year or so.
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Led by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, Ukraine’s closest EU allies scored a separate win by convincing the bloc to adopt the emergency clause under Article 122 of the EU Treaties, which will keep Russia’s assets frozen indefinitely. So that softens the blow somewhat, too.
The Article 122 vote means the EU will no longer be bound by unanimity among the bloc’s 27 members, a bug in the system that has allowed Russia-friendly states like Hungary to hold the EU in a state of paralysis. Now, if the EU majority can hold the line, Russia’s assets in Europe will remain frozen until Moscow pays full war reparations to Kyiv.
It’s no small thing that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy can maintain a functioning state and pay for his country’s defence into 2027, but last week’s compromise was forced on the EU majority by Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever. The manoeuvres were underway against a backdrop of Russian strongarming and disturbing intrigues in Euroclear’s executive offices.
A macabre twist in the story originates in Donald Trump’s White House, which has been engaged in intense deal-making in Moscow, and lately in........