The will look at ways of using the future interest from frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine as it continues to battle , finance ministers from the group said on Saturday.
The meeting of the G7 ministers in the northern Italian city of Stresa has been focused mainly on the question of how to find more funds for Ukraine as Russia presses on with a new offensive in the Kharkiv region in the third year of its unprovoked invasion.
The G7 and its allies froze some $300 billion (€276 billion) of Russian assets shortly after Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.
The meeting comes after the EU this week formally approved a plan to use interest from the Russian assets it has frozen, estimating that this could produce up to €3 billion annually for Kyiv.
What could the plan look like?
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said ministers aimed to “reach a political agreement in principle” and not a ready-made solution.
A draft statement from the meeting seen by the Reuters news agency said: “We are making progress in our discussions on potential avenues to bring forward the extraordinary profits stemming from immobilized Russian sovereign assets to the benefit of Ukraine.”
The statement contained no figures or details, reflecting the fact that several legal and technical issues need to be resolved before such loans could be made.
Any detailed agreement would require the approval of G7 leaders, who meet next month in Puglia, Italy.
The United States, for its part, has been urging its G7 partners — Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada — to create a loan facility for Ukraine backed by future interest generated by the frozen Russian assets.
That proposal, which could raise $50 billion in the short term for Kyiv, raises several questions, including who would issue the debt and the apportioning of risk between the G7 partners.
The ministers will be joined on Saturday by Ukraine’s finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko.
Ukraine struggling amid shortages
The meeting comes as Kyiv claims to have
However, that claim came amid admissions by Ukraine’s General Staff that “the enemy has partial success” and that “the situation is tense.”
Ukraine’s army is currently running short of arms and ammunition, a situation made worse by a amid a domestic political dispute, with the funding not released until late in April.
In another positive development for Kyiv on Friday, however, Washington announced
tj/lo (AFP, Reuters)
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