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Ukrainian Minister of Justice Denis Maliuska said Friday that Ukraine would demand $300 billion in war reparations from Russia. This amount corresponds to Russian National Bank funds frozen as part of sanctions against Moscow.
Kyiv aims to get the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution laying the groundwork for an international compensation mechanism, said the minister, who has been visiting Berlin since Thursday.
“We want compensation for all the damage that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine through its war of aggression,” Maliuska told Funke media group newspapers in an interview.
The minister claimed that the direct damage caused by the destruction of infrastructure, housing, and factories amounts to far more than the named amount.
“To this must be added environmental and personal damages, which were inflicted on the war victims and which cannot be quantified at the moment. We assume that hundreds of thousands of people have died due to the war. Their relatives are entitled to compensation,” he said.
Along with access to the funds of the Russian National Bank frozen in the countries of the G7 club of industrialized nations, he, therefore, called for Kyiv to be able to receive as reparations the money stored abroad by Russian state-owned companies such as Gazprom or Rosneft.
He also requested that Ukraine obtain access to the frozen property of Russian oligarchs.
“The reasons for lifting state immunity for foreign assets of an aggressor state like Russia should be anchored in the international contract,” he said, referring to the hypothetical compensation mechanism that would be established after the corresponding UN resolution.
It would allow acceding states to amend their national legislation to allow for the confiscation of Russian assets, and an international commission would be set up to consider compensation claims, he said.
Maliuska, who met with his German counterpart, Marco Buschmann, in Berlin on Thursday, asked for the support of the German government at the UN General Assembly, which he said would lead other countries to join the initiative.
