US negotiators want Europe to unfreeze Russian cash and hand it to Washington
Just when you thought peace deal brainstorming couldn't get wilder, American envoys pitched taking Europe's frozen Russian billions and running them through DC.
During recent talks in Miami, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner floated a surreal plan to envoys from Ukraine and the EU: unfreeze a chunk of Russia's immobilized state cash and park it in a brand-new special fund overseen directly by Washington.
European diplomats shut down the pitch on the spot, visibly blindsided by the suggestion to unlock Moscow's war chest just to tempt the Kremlin back to the negotiating table. The vast majority of the roughly $300 billion in frozen assets sits in European clearinghouses, not American ones, making the offer to "supervise" it an impressive display of transatlantic audacity.
Offering to manage someone else's frozen billions as a bargaining chip is certainly one way to conjure diplomatic leverage out of thin air.
Source: Financial Times
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