US has frozen $8bn worth of Russian assets, mostly in EU, Japan

The United States has frozen USD 8 billion worth of Russian sovereign assets, most of them in the EU and Japan, US special representative for Ukraine's economic recovery Penny Pritzker said.

Western countries have frozen USD 300 billion worth of Russian assets in response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

The US has frozen USD 8 billion worth of Russian sovereign assets, with the bulk in the EU and Japan, Ms Prizker was quoted by the Financial Times as saying.

Some countries have called for the money to be used to rebuild Ukraine, but other stakeholders, including the European Central Bank, have expressed reservations about the legality and implications of such a move.

There is "extraordinary work going on by legal teams to understand what is possible" to do with the assets, Ms Pritzker said.

"Fundamentally, if I were to say not from a legal standpoint, but from an ethical and moral standpoint, given the destruction that the Russians have caused to Ukraine, you know, they ought to be contributing to the recovery of Ukraine," she told reporters on Wednesday.

"Legally, how one gets that done is something that’s being worked on."

Over the year and a half of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, the United States has seized more than USD 1 billion in private Russian assets in other countries.