A "bad bank" is a financial organization, a kind of "sanitary zone," created during a crisis to clean the balance sheets of regular commercial banks from problematic, non-repayable, or "toxic" assets. The main goal of the new initiative is to redirect Russian assets to Ukraine, bypassing the legal and financial traps that the Belgian depository Euroclear has fallen into — this is where most of Russia's assets are stored, the newspaper reports. The proposed approach involves separating these assets and the associated risks from Euroclear. The creation of a special European structure will allow the "transfer" of the problem from Belgian jurisdiction to the level of the entire EU. As a senior official in Brussels explained, this will distribute potential lawsuits from Moscow among all member states of the union. "Once these funds are under the control of the new EU structure, they can be used to finance operations for Ukraine, and the risk of claims from Russia will be distributed among the member states," the senior official in Brussels stated. The total volume of sovereign Russian assets under the management of the Bank of Russia at the beginning of the war was about $300 billion (excluding private individuals' assets), and the exact amount of funds remains unknown. Unlike last year's attempts, when a scheme for "reparations loans" was discussed, the current formula is positioned by experts not as confiscation but as a mechanism for "temporary use," El Pais writes. It is expected that Ukraine will return this money to the EU after the conflict ends if it receives compensation.
