"Given that Russia will only pay reparations if defeated on the battlefield, a faint prospect made fainter by Europe’s refusal to raise serious money for Ukraine, Brussels’s latest toxic finance comes intertwined with an impediment to any peace deal. For Moscow will never accept a peace deal under which it must repay, from its frozen assets, the debts that Europe is now raising in the financial markets to fund Ukraine. Such a proposal may thus seem senseless to any sane person wishing for a ceasefire and a peace deal. Not so to the EU’s leaders, for whom a never-ending war in Ukraine has become their only strategy, their only business plan, their only mantra.Now, as if to prove that no zombie idea ever dies in Brussels, Kaja Kallas, who is the EU’s foreign and defense policy chief, is threatening to revive the earlier idea of a loan secured against the returns of Russian assets. And so the farce continues in cycles and along a trajectory detrimental to Ukrainians, Russians, and the vast majority of Europeans.In retrospect, Europe’s toxic finance, in both the Greek and the Ukrainian cases, is what happens when Europe’s oligarchy seeks to raise debt so as to prolong highly damaging crises until it can find a solution that benefits itself, at great cost to the vast majority of Europeans. In both cases, structured derivatives, lifted straight out of the darkest corners of Wall Street, are deployed in the name of solidarity (with the Greeks, the Ukrainians, etc.) and for the purposes of pursuing Europe’s common interest. However, behind this facade, it is not hard to discern the sad reality of a moribund continent in the clutches of ruling classes that treat Europeans with less compassion than the ancient Spartans treated the Helots."https://jacobin.com/2026/03/eu-russia-ukraine-debt-finance-kallas/#EU #Europe #Russia #Ukraine #War #Imperialism #Debt #Finance
