AFSE Blog: Euroclear and the Geopolitics of Russia’s Immobilized Assets
By Olena Havrylchyk, Professor of Economics at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Researcher at the Centre d’Économie de la Sorbonne.
The use of the Bank of Russia’s immobilized assets held at Euroclear to fund a “reparations loan” for Ukraine is currently under discussion within the European Council. In this post, which is a slightly revised version of a column published on VoxEU on 11 December 2025, Olena Havrylchyk explains how European central securities depositories operate and why Euroclear has become a critical bottleneck holding most of Russia’s immobilized assets. She documents the exceptional profits generated by these assets, the political push toward de facto confiscation despite concerns about financial stability, as well as several proposals for using immobilized and frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction.