Giving Frozen Russian Assets To Ukraine Would ‘Break the Global Financial System’

Late last week, it was reported in US media that some top Republicans in the US House of Representatives were developing a plan that would loan Ukraine money from the $300 billion in Russian assets that were frozen by the United States following the start of the special operation in Ukraine.

Giving Russia's seized assets to Ukraine would break the global financial system, journalist and author Dan Lazare told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Tuesday. He also warned that it would be the equivalent of the United States declaring war on Russia.

“It’s a very dangerous step,” Lazare warned. “It’s really quite amazing that the whole system is just running downhill at a remarkably increasing speed… [seizing Russian assets] will spook Saudi Arabia and it’ll spook China. The whole global financial system sort of rests on a kind of lawful sense of cooperation, but if you break that you break the whole system.”

“It’s kind of a declaration, it’s a widening of the war [and] it’s a declaration of war on Russia by the United States,” he added later.

Lazare reminded co-hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong that last year the Biden administration was “triumphant” about Ukraine’s accomplishments on the battlefield a year ago but that things have since turned “sharply negative.”

“The Ukrainian forces are starting to come apart. I think the word crumble is probably too strong a term at this point, but they certainly are showing the strain,” he explained. “They’re running out of artillery shells, they’re running out of other armaments and Russia is making steady advances. So the question is now ‘how long will this process go on before Ukraine cracks?’”

Lazare said that the situation in Ukraine has US President Joe Biden “scared as hell” and that he has “no idea” how to get around the “roadblock” of Congress blocking further financial aid.

“It’s really hard to believe that the US will allow Ukraine to sink beneath the waves, but that seems to be what’s happening,” he added.

“That means abandoning very close allies,” Lazare said. “Especially given the fact [that] the US really caused this war in the first place by backing a far-right-led military coup back in 2014, which made a Russian military response more or less inevitable.”