De Wever Puts Belgium First Against EU Lawlessness

Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission has grown tired of the law. Terrified by the prospect of American success in brokering peace for Ukraine, the Eurocrats are determined to keep fueling the fires of war—while avoiding paying for it themselves. Their solution is, to say the least, inventive: knowing that further pillaging of Europe’s coffers to fund the unwinnable conflict in the East would amount to electoral suicide, they are now attempting to confiscate Russia’s own sovereign financial reserves, the majority of which are frozen at Euroclear in Belgium. Indeed, they have now decided to permanently freeze those reserves, therefore nullifying the possibility of member states voting for their release, under the obviously ludicrous pretext that this constitutes an emergency response to an imagined EU economic crisis. As von der Leyen hits at the very foundations of international financial stability, European credibility, and international law, Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever has emerged as an unlikely champion of prudence.

It is not that De Wever’s pro-Ukraine enthusiasm can be reasonably doubted. The Belgian Prime Minister has been abundantly generous to Kyiv: last April, he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Ukrainian capital to announce Belgian military support worth a billion euros. De Wever has taken an orthodox, Establishment-aligned, hawkish stance on the conflict even as Washington has stated that Kyiv does not “hold the cards” in the war and should do its best to achieve peace as soon as it can. Under De Wever, the Kingdom has been one of the few Western states to supply fighter jets to the Ukrainian Air Force; Brussels is currently studying much larger and more generous transfers. Say what you will of De Wever, but he is no dove—he has been a committed ally of Zelensky and placed himself firmly in the pro-war camp together with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and, of course, Commission President von der Leyen. 

It has all been to no avail. De Wever has now fallen from grace, derided as a “Putin asset” and as an enemy of democracy. The Belgian prime minister hasn’t expressly ruled out partaking in the expropriation of an estimated 200 billion euros in Russian assets located in the EU, even though doing this would permanently and irreversibly undermine the status of the euro as a global reserve currency, lead other powers at odds with the EU—including China, which holds a sizeable part of its enormous foreign currency reserves, estimated at around 3 trillion dollars, in the European single currency—to divest from Europe, and shatter the Bretton Woods system as it has existed since the Second World War. Faced with the stubborn insistence of his European partners, he is, understandably, ready to grant Brussels its death wish, allowing it to cause immeasurable economic damage to the continent. He is, after all, only Belgium’s prime minister, not the guardian of European sanity. All he has asked is that Belgium not be forced to carry the vast majority of the burden on its own. That is why he is being busily demonized by his colleagues and the press.

As De Wever has argued, the confiscation of another nation’s financial reserves is patently illegal under the existing, binding principle of par in parem non habet imperium—the idea, foundational under international law, of state immunity. Central bank funds are, like the premises of an embassy, immune government property—they are, thus, protected under international law. Were Belgium in a state of armed conflict with Russia, the idea of unilateral seizure of Moscow’s Euroclear assets would be contentious but potentially admissible. With neither Brussels nor any EU member state at war with Russia, the illegality of the action is not really under dispute. As passionate as the European leadership may be about the Ukrainian conflict, the fact of the matter is that this is a war opposing two non-EU, non-NATO countries—formally speaking, EU countries are not more involved in it than, say, in the Indo-Pakistani or Congo-Rwanda conflicts. Indeed, there is a case of a non-EU state illegally occupying the sovereign territory of an EU country, but it isn’t Russia with Ukraine—it is Turkey with northern Cyprus. If such spectacular action were at all legitimate, it would surely make far more sense for the EU to expropriate Turkish assets than anybody else’s.

Knowing they can’t simply take over Russia’s money, the Eurocrats have concocted a predictably farcical ploy: the notion that the money would guarantee an EU loan to Ukraine, keeping the country—which is to say, the war—afloat for another year or so, but would not be the loan itself. Then, they say, a defeated, broken, begging Russia would, at the end of the war, legally relinquish its money to Ukraine in the form of war reparations, giving the whole thing a patina of legitimacy. 

The idea would be perfect—if only it wasn’t so utterly insane. As De Wever has said in the Belgian Parliament, no sane person still believes, as of December 2025, that Russia will be beaten on the battlefield or voluntarily give away its cash to Kyiv. Moscow, thus, will come back for its money, and the law will be on its side. Von der Leyen’s cunning plan will become a gigantic liability for Belgium’s and Europe’s taxpayers, who will then be forced to return both the hundreds of billions of euros seized and pay indemnities for breaking the law. The Eurocrats don’t care—like former Commission President José Manuel Durão Barroso, they will, by then, likely be enjoying golden retirements at Goldman Sachs or J. P. Morgan. But ordinary Europeans will still be here, and they will be the ones obliged to foot the bill.

What von der Leyen and her hapless entourage are imposing on Europe is a reckless maneuver, indeed. But what is worse is that it is also deeply cowardly. Even as they shame the Belgians into accepting potential bankruptcy and decades of financial servitude to Moscow, the European Establishment is revealingly timid about taking the first step. The French are certainly in no hurry to do anything about the nearly 20 billion euros in Russian money their banks hold. Ditto for Britain’s banks, wary that Putin will one day come to collect the estimated 8 billion euros deposited in London. Yet Belgium, a country of 12 million with a 700 billion dollar economy, is being asked to place a financial time bomb of hundreds of billions under the feet of its citizens or “face the Hungary treatment”—that is, naked bullying and arm-twisting by an out-of-control, imperial, European Commission.

There is, of course, a profound irony in the Berlaymont threatening the Belgian government with the “Hungary treatment”—one of the Commission’s favorite tools in its multi-year campaign against Hungary. The Belgian government is now being force-fed its own venom. But the fact remains that, with the Commission reaching new heights of lawlessness and irresponsibility, De Wever has found the strength, dignity, and patriotism to resist a push that he knows to be bad for Europe and catastrophic for Belgium. He will probably bend the knee in the end. However, even if he does, he will still have won a place in the history books for, at least, having tried to stop Europe’s descent into madness. By that alone, he will have done more than most.