US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced yesterday Wednesday (10/5) that the first transfer of confiscated Russian funds for reconstruction Ukrainian postwar.

In February, Merrick Garland approved the withdrawal of $5.3 million from Russian accounts. oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.

“I approved the transfer of these funds (…) to heal the suffering caused by Russia’s unjust war” against Ukraine, he recalled. The amount “is now transferred to the State Department and will be allocated for these purposes,” he added. “This is the first US transfer of seized Russian funds to rebuild Ukraine, but it won’t be the last.”he interpreted.

The US government announced in March 2022, days after the Russian army invaded Ukraine, the creation of a special task force tasked with prosecuting “corrupt Russian oligarchs” and those who violate Washington’s sanctions against Moscow.

Since then, it has imposed sanctions and proceeded to confiscate, among other things, more than a billion dollars worth of yachts and private jets, while freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian elites saved in US accounts.

In the EU, the Commission is pushing for the harmonization of rules so that sanctions circumvention can be treated as a crime across the continent, making it easier to confiscate the assets in question and potentially use them to rebuild Ukraine.