EU seeks to use frozen Russian funds to rebuild Ukraine

OSLO (Reuters) -The European Union will on Wednesday launch an ad hoc group to investigate how billions of dollars in frozen Russian funds, including central bank reserves, can be used for reconstruction work in Ukraine, the Swedish government said on Tuesday.

“The mandate is to contribute to mapping which funds have been frozen in the European Union … and secondly how to legally proceed to access those funds,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told a news conference in Stockholm.

No prior model exists for how to handle the Russian assets, and the EU must make sure that appropriate legal procedures are established, he said.

“It’s Russian tax payers, not all other tax payers, who must bear the cost of the necessary reconstruction work,” Kristersson added.

Sweden currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

The ad hoc group will be headed by Anders Ahnlid, the head of Sweden’s National Board of Trade, a government agency.

Among the key assets will be Russian central bank funds expected to amount to tens of billions of dollars, Ahnlid said.

“The EU has never before used frozen funds for the reconstruction of a war-torn country, so we are in a sense chartering new territory,” Ahnlid added.

(Reporting by Terje Solsvik, editing by Essi Lehto, Niklas Pollard and Sandra Maler)