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US and Ukraine talk about financial support | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
WASHINGTON – A senior US Treasury official met with Ukrainian officials in Kiev to discuss US financial support, the application of sanctions on Russia and the use of frozen Russian assets to benefit Ukraine in the war with Moscow.
This week’s visit by Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo came after Russia gained territory following a long delay in U.S. military aid, leaving Ukraine at the mercy of Russia’s largest military. However, the outlook for Ukraine’s public finances is more unstable.
“Russia’s economy has become a wartime economy where all means of production and industry are now focused on building weapons to fight their war of choice and aggression here in Ukraine,” Adeyemo told reporters on Wednesday fair in the capital of Ukraine. “And we need to do everything we can to achieve that.”
Adeyemo held talks with officials from the Ministry of Finance and the office of the President of Ukraine. At the Kiev School of Economics, he spoke with professors and civil society groups working on sanctions policy and ways to make sanctions against Russia more effective.
President Joe Biden signed legislation in April that allows Washington to seize about $5 billion in Russian state assets located in the United States. But most of the $260 billion in frozen Russian assets are in Europe, and U.S. officials are hoping for consensus from their European allies on how to spend that money.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met in Italy last week with her Group of Seven counterparts to discuss how to extract money from frozen Russian assets to support Kiev’s war effort.
She said lending Ukraine $50 billion of assets “was mentioned as a possible number that could be achieved” but that the specific approach was under discussion.
Adeyemo, meanwhile, targeted China’s economic support for Russia through the sale of dual-use goods. U.S. officials said China has increased sales to Russia of machine tools, microelectronics and other technologies that Moscow is using to produce missiles, tanks, aircraft and other weaponry for use in war.
China has said it is not providing weapons or military assistance to Russia, although Beijing has maintained robust economic links with Moscow.
“The only way Russia is able to build the weapons it wants is to obtain dual-use products from China,” Adeyemo said. “Only through the support of the Chinese will Russia be able to build these weapons on the scale necessary to continue this war and to be able to fight this war of aggression and to be able to build the military industrial complex that it needs to move forward.”
US authorities are putting pressure on American companies to ensure their products do not end up in the hands of the Russian military.
Daleep Singh, deputy U.S. national security adviser for international economics, said in a speech Tuesday at the Brookings Institute in Washington that he wanted to “issue an urgent call for corporate responsibility – a percentage of Russian battlefield weaponry with branded components of the US or allies is unacceptably high. Put your creativity and resources to work.
Adeyemo said he will give a speech on Friday in Berlin about how the US and its allies “can do more to ensure that goods from our countries are not sent through third countries and also end up in Russia”.