Seizing frozen Russian assets by the European Union would be tantamount to declaring war on Russia. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said this, and government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs published an excerpt of his speech on the social media platform X.
“Manipulating Russian assets, seizing Russian assets would be a declaration of war“, Orban said.
According to him, seizing hundreds of billions of euros belonging to the state would inevitably lead to retaliatory measures.
A day earlier, Orban said that the likely decision of the EU Council to permanently freeze Russian assets would cause “irreparable“ damage to the regional union.
On December 11, Reuters reported that EU member states' ambassadors had begun a written procedure aimed at formally approving the European Union Council's decision to permanently freeze Russian assets. The agency noted that this step was aimed at “creating conditions for the use of Russian Federation assets in the interests of Ukraine“.