Belgium Blocks Ukraine’s Reparations Loan — Then Gets a Taste of Hybrid War
Brussels balks at handing over frozen Russian assets even as suspected Kremlin drones shut down its skies.
When Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever scuttled a €140 billion EU plan to channel profits from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, he argued that Belgium was being unfairly singled out. “The fattest chicken is in Belgium,” he said, “but there are other chickens around.”
That may be true — but now the chicken has come home to roost. This week, Belgian intelligence sources told the Belga news agency they suspect a “state actor, most likely Russia,” was behind coordinated drone incursions that forced the closure of Brussels and Liège airports and targeted military sites, including Kleine-Brogel, which hosts US nuclear weapons.
Flights were grounded, F-35 base operations disrupted, and the National Crisis Center activated. Defense Minister Theo Francken called the incidents “coordinated and deliberate,” urging rapid investment in counter-drone systems.
Belgium’s defence minister, Theo Francken, told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday the incidents in Belgium appeared to be coordinated to foment disruption, involving large drones flying in formation. “It is in line with the hybrid techniques seen in other countries. This is not just someone who flies a drone by chance over a military site or airport … There are a number of indications that this was organised in a very structured way.”
The irony is glaring. Belgium has been balking at a proposal to funnel the roughly €190 billion in Russian Central Bank assets sitting at Brussels-based Euroclear to help rebuild Ukraine — even as it now finds itself on the receiving end of Moscow’s gray-zone aggression.
Elsewhere, Western allies remain opaque about their own shares of Russia’s immobilised billions — from Japan’s suspected €30 billion to the US’s €4 billion — citing legal and data-protection barriers. Only Switzerland has admitted to holding around €8 billion.
Why It Matters:
Belgium’s hesitation exposes a deeper Western dilemma: how to punish Russia without touching its money — even as Moscow continues to weaponize everything from energy to airspace. As I argued on CNN recently, Belgium and other European leaders can act now in a relatively painless — administratively complex but politically manageable — way and release frozen Russian assets. Or wait until Russian mischief escalates to the point where they are forced to pay more later, in the form of bomb shelters in kindergartens and schools. With drones already over Brussels, that calculus just got painfully immediate.
A plan to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction with profits from frozen Russian assets has run into a wall of secrecy, Euronews has found. At the latest EU summit, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever blocked the proposed €140 billion “reparations loan,” arguing that Brussels was being unfairly targeted because Euroclear—based in Belgium—holds the largest chunk of Russian Central Bank assets, around €190 billion. De Wever’s retort that “the fattest chicken is in Belgium, but there are other chickens around” underscored a deeper problem: no one seems to know—or will admit—where the rest of Moscow’s €300 billion in immobilised funds actually sit. Euronews found that most Western countries, from France and Germany to Japan and the US, either refused to disclose details or claimed legal barriers to doing so. Only Switzerland confirmed holding €8 billion in Russian assets; Luxembourg, paradoxically, said less than €10,000 — a far cry from earlier EU estimates of €10–20 billion.
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