US believes that the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after the conflict continues to grow and already exceeds the estimated amount of 486 billion dollars quoted by the World Bank (WB).
This was stated by a high-ranking representative of the American administration, quoted by TASS.
„Recovery costs continue to rise. The latest World Bank estimate was $486 billion. Now the amount is undoubtedly higher, especially given the damage to Ukraine's energy infrastructure in recent weeks,” he said at a special online briefing for journalists on the occasion of President Joe Biden's participation in the G7 meeting in Italy.
„So the discussion focused on who should pay, and that's where the Russian asset freeze proposal came in,”, he added. The representative of the US administration noted that the Western countries have reached a “unanimous agreement” that Russia should pay for the restoration of Ukraine.
G7 leaders at a summit in Italy on June 13 reached an agreement to release $50 billion to Ukraine from profits from frozen Russian assets by the end of 2024.
The European Union, Canada, the United States and Japan have frozen about $300 billion in Russian assets after the start of a special military operation. Of that, about $5-6 billion is located in the US, with most of it in Europe, including the Euroclear international site in Belgium (where $210 billion is kept).