[I post below an article of considerable importance which I released on http://www.gilbertdoctorow.substack.com, the platform on which I publish my essays several times a week – available by subscription. The issue discussed here is critical: I insist that what the Belgian prime minister is doing may have greater impact on an early end to the Ukraine war, due to impending bankruptcy of the Ukrainian state, than the much celebrated Russian military victory in Pokrovsk or than Viktor Orban’s theatrics)

PM Bart De Wever presents the most effective resistance to the usurper President of the European Commission and European war mongers that we have today

The European leader who is best known in Alternative Media for standing up to the imperious, autocratic Ursula von der Leyen is surely the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. He has decried the Commission’s policies towards Russia and threatened to veto funding of arms to Ukraine as well as every new round of sanctions against Moscow.  He has gone twice to Moscow, on a peace mission without any ‘by your leave’ from Brussels, as Chancellor Merz pointed out in acid criticism of Orban yesterday. He will be headed back there in a week or two as head of a big trade delegation.

Orban sought and obtained from Trump permission to continue buying Russian gas and oil without facing secondary sanctions.

But note: Orban has been acting strictly in defense of his country’s economic interests. He wants the Ukraine war to end for fear that it will escalate out of control into a pan-European war.  He has used the threat of vetoes in the European Council to extort various economic and financial concessions from the EU. When the day of voting arrives, each time Orban steps back and joins the conformist 26 other European Member States to vote ‘yes.’

Now I propose for the Community’s consideration as the more impactful hero of our times an unlikely candidate whom you have probably never heard of:  Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever.

 In his public pronouncements, De Wever has stuck to the official EU line of unwavering support for Kiev in its just cause against the Russian aggressor.  But in practice, he is now striking a blow at von der Leyen’s jugular by withholding his approval of her plans for what amounts to confiscation of roughly 200 billion euros in frozen Russian state assets for the purpose of financing Kiev in two more years of war against Russia.

By doing this, De Wever, like Orban, is doing his job as protector of his nation’s prosperity. Should the von der Leyen initiative pass, should the frozen assets secure massive loans to Ukraine that will not and cannot be repaid, should Russia win its expected law suits against confiscation, which clearly violates international law so that the confiscated assets are ordered returned to Moscow, then Belgium as a state will be financially ruined – obliged to pay back the equivalent of one-third of its annual GDP.  Unlike Orban, De Wever, is unlikely to be bought off by some financial concessions from the EU budget.  He is likely to go all the way and carry his veto to the next and decisive session of the European Council on 18-19 December. 

This past Friday both Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz foisted themselves on De Wever for a dinner at which they intended to bring him around.  Merz reportedly even cancelled a state visit to Norway otherwise scheduled for Friday with reception by the Norwegian king to instead apply his force of will against the leader of that little country that Germans had twice overrun and occupied in the last century.

Had they paid closer attention to what De Wever did the day before, von der Leyen and Merz would have found reasons to pass up the dinner with De Wever as mission impossible.  In fact, the day before De Wever spoke to the Chamber of Representatives (lower house of the bicameral Belgian legislature) and reiterated there why he objects to the confiscation as carrying unacceptable risks for the country. He received a standing ovation and as the French-language daily Le Soir remarked in its well-hidden online article about the parliamentary session, a very rare moment in political life took place:  the leader of a Far Left party stood up in the chamber and congratulated De Wever on his speech, saying that he shared De Wever’s reasoning.  Those of you who have some experience of the highly politicized and poisonous relations between Right and Left in European legislatures will savor this account. De Wever is the head of a conservative, Thatcher-style economics party.

Surely, von der Leyen and Merz had indigestion when they left the dinner table from their time with De Wever.

 You read nothing about the outcome of this meeting in mainstream US and UK media because, as Le Soir announced in its two paragraph coverage yesterday, the parties agreed to continue talking about the problem and trying to find a solution that satisfies Belgium’s demand for water-tight legal guarantees from all other EU Member States that they will share the risks of the confiscation in case it goes wrong and the funds must be reconstituted and handed over to Moscow. We can be nearly certain that such guarantees will not be delivered on 18 December because numerous Member States, including notably, France, refuse to cooperate.

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Though Ursula von der Leyen has spent more than six years at her Commission job in Brussels, and though she was born in the Brussels central borough of Ixelles and so became fluent in French during her childhood, which is a key reason why Macron backed her for the job, she seems not to have spent enough time in the North of the country and has no understanding of how stubborn a true Fleming can be. Perhaps during her years here she was too cozy with corrupt Belgian French speakers from the Liberal MR Party like her Commissioner of Justice for five years, Didier Reynders, now facing prison time for money laundering, something he understood inside out from his many years as Belgium’s Finance Minister in several successive coalition governments. Or she became cocky after taming Reynders’ former boss at MR, Charles Michel, with whom Ursula crossed swords during his time as head of the rival executive body of the EU, the European Council; at the start of his tenure, he challenged von der Leyen for the one vacant seat at a meeting but by the time he left office, von der Leyen was wiping the floor with Michel.

Prime Minister Bart De Wever, a Flemish nationalist, is giving her a good lesson in what it means to be a true Fleming and to be concerned about national survival instead of about feathering one’s own nest.

The entire conflict arose because the President of the European Commission is desperate to use frozen Russian state assets held in Europe to finance Ukraine’s budgetary needs and procurement of weapons so that the war may continue for another couple of years while Europe restores its military industry and raises its numbers of soldiers at arms through conscription and volunteer enlistment schemes in order to be ready to engage Russia in a kinetic war by the end of the decade.

The Commission leadership, like the vast majority of heads of government in the EU Member States has invested all its political capital in a Ukrainian victory. They understand fully well that Ursula and her team may lose their grip on power when the Ukrainians conclude a peace on Russia’s terms, which presently is what Donald Trump is facilitating by his mediation.

The single largest repository of frozen Russian state assets happens to be in Euroclear, a financial entity in Belgium. The top management of Euroclear opposes what would effectively be the confiscation of the assets under the various schemes proposed by von der Leyen. The head of the European Central Bank has sounded the alarm, warning that the damage to the Euro might be irremediable and refusing to act as a back-stop to any loan in which the assets are used as collateral. And the Belgian prime minister has used these arguments to justify his rejection of the confiscation schemes, together with the argument that confiscating the frozen assets would undermine the ongoing peace negotiations. Also in these past few days De Wever has reportedly said publicly that the notion of Russia being defeated ‘is a fairy tale and total illusion,’ though he may have retracted this later (per Echo de la Bourse), when the security services claimed the statement was ‘serving Russian disinformation.’

In the final section of this essay set out below, I provide an overview of how the dramatic actions of the Prime Minister have been covered by the leading French and Flemish language daily newspapers.

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I have just cited a tiny article in the 5 December issue of the largest French-language financial daily in Belgium, L’Echo.  The same issue has two full pages of articles on the question of risks to Euroclear if the frozen Russian assets are touched, on the planned Friday visit with De Wever by the German Chancellor and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ‘to try and force De Wever to yield on the Russian assets,’ as well as a long column editorial on the Russian assets – ‘to construct a moral framework at cheap cost.’

Let us begin with the editorial, which it seems to me dances from foot to foot. The editors remark that the money locked in the Russian assets would resolve a triple threat facing Ukraine in the near future: “the drying up of means to sustain Ukraine financially and militarily in the context of the ever more evident departure of the United States; the future bankruptcy – said to be in a few months – of the Ukrainian state; and more recently, the whims of Donald Trump that we see in his ‘peace plan’ – to himself seize part of the Euroclear assets.”

The editors identify a collective lack of motivation with respect to Ukraine among the EU Member States that reveals itself in the negotiations over the frozen Russian assets. 

This brings the editorial board to the punch line:  “Belgium’s partners only pay lip service to the solidarity that our government rightly demands.”

To my reading this is a thumbs down to Ursula and a vote of confidence in Bart De Wever’s stand.

The article in L’echo de la bourse on the plans of Berlin and the European Commission to try to bend De Wever to their will has some very interesting detailed information. First, the author claims that the vote of the 27 heads of government on 18 December over the use of the assets in Euroclear will require approval only from a qualified majority, not unanimity, so that opposition from Belgium can be overruled. If that is true, and I have my doubts, then one wonders why Merz and von der Leyen would spend their time trying to bring De Wever around to their plans.

Another point in this article may be more useful and factually correct:  that the von der Leyen plan is to loan Kiev a total of 165 billion euros, of which 45 billion euros would be made available in 2026 and the same amount in 2027, reserving the rest for later years. The allocation of these sums would be 110 billion for purchase of arms and 55 billion for the needs of their Treasury. We may assume that this is to cover government employee salaries and pay to soldiers. This sum would be guaranteed by 210 billion euros in Russian assets held in Europe, of which 185 billion are in Euroclear (Belgium) and 25 billion in France, Germany, Sweden and Cyprus. The difference between the loan to Kiev of 165 billion and the 210 billion would be used to reimburse a G7 loan extended to Ukraine in 2024.

This article further informs us that the Commission intends to use article 122 of the EU Treaty to forbid the transfer of the frozen assets to Russia. This they say is “An audacious interpretation of the article conferring emergency powers and making it possible to get around the need for unanimity in case of economic crisis.” I am left to wonder if the author has not assumed that the aforementioned vote on the Euroclear assets will be by only qualified majority because article 122 is being invoked.

Finally this L’Echo article describes the overall political contest between the EU and Belgium as follows: it is a fight between, on the one hand, the European centrist majority of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats),  the Socialists (Socialists and Democrats), and the Liberals of Renew (the Macron faction) versus the group of European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a Right radical, neo-Atlanticist party close to Trump in which De Wever’s N-VA party belongs.

The author, Vincent Georis, sees the solution in getting Europe to offer sufficient guarantees to Belgium. But the Editorial, as noted above, does not expect this to happen.

The L’Echo article by Xander Vlassenbroeck on the risks that Euroclear faces if the frozen Russian assets are touched opens by mentioning that Euroclear is a repository presently holding 42 trillion dollars in global assets. The proposed loan to Kiev based on the frozen Russian assets as collateral is the present “Plan A” of the Commission.  Its “Plan B” is for the EU to finance the loan directly from its own budget, but that is said to be less realistic because of the tough legislative process it would face.

As for Plan A, the author notes that the CEO of Euroclear Valerie Urbain has sent a letter to the Commission stating that the rather vague guarantees of risk sharing so far produced by the Commission are not sufficient reassurance. She considers that the Plan A would be seen as ‘confiscation’ outside the EU and would dissuade investors from depositing money in Europe, including in State bonds, all of which would have a bad impact on interest rates. She said in an interview with Le Monde, that she did not exclude the possibility of taking the European institutions to court if the ‘fiduciary obligations’ of Euroclear were compromised. After all, Euroclear is a systemic institution whose bankruptcy could cause a major crisis for all exchanges. It depends more than other banks on the confidence of its clients, for whom it is responsible for 42 trillion euros of assets in the world.  Euroclear is seen to be politically neutral, but if this is compromised by a confiscation that is politically motivated, then there will be repercussions not only on Euroclear but on the European capital markets.   Apparently, the Chinese have already signaled to Euroclear that they are following this case very closely.  Meanwhile, people are asking what the shareholders of Euroclear are thinking about this issue. They include the French Caisse des depots, but also the sovereign fund of New Zealand, that of Singapore, Chinese and Australian public entities. Up till now, they all have been very discreet.

Finally, I turn to the 5 December issue of the Flemish newspaper De Standaard.  I have in front of me an article with the peculiar title “De Wever’s statement that it is not desirable for Russia to lose fuels anti-Belgian sentiment”

The first paragraph of this article points to disinformation about what De Wever did or did not say during a lecture he delivered in French in the Bozar auditorium in downtown Brussels in the past week:

“With tensions rising over the Russian billions, criticism of Belgium and Prime Minister De Wever is also increasing. It was already harsh, but a sentence from a French-language lecture has given it a further boost.”

“At press conferences, in an official letter to the European Commission, and during interviews, Prime Minister Bart De Wever repeatedly explains why it is particularly risky to use Russian assets frozen in Belgium for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

“That was no different on Monday evening at a lecture for a French-speaking audience at the Bozar art center in Brussels.

“The editor-in-chief of La Libre Belgique interviewed De Wever after that lecture and asked a question about the delicate financial issue, after which a summary of that conversation appeared in the French-language newspaper.

“In it, De Wever uttered a few sentences that reinforced the critics’ vision of a country that would not side with Ukraine. ‘Who really believes that Russia will lose in Ukraine?’ said De Wever. ‘That is a myth, a total illusion. It is not even desirable for her to lose and for instability to arise in a country that possesses nuclear weapons.’

“The specific passage from the printed interview, particularly the section entitled “It is not desirable for Russia to lose,” has been widely shared on social media since Thursday. Among others, a former Ukrainian diplomat drew attention to De Wever’s statements.

“For weeks, a campaign has been raging on X and Telegram, with predominantly pro-Ukraine voices accusing Belgium of being selfish, endangering European security, and abandoning Ukraine. Even during World War II, Germany’s money was not confiscated,’ said the prime minister.”

Another article in the same issue of Standaard has the title “De Wever enjoys support from PVDA and Vlaams Belang on Euroclear.”  This is not intended as a compliment.  PVDA is the Workers’ Party of Belgium, a Marxist party headed by Raoul Hedebouw.  Hedebouw is the deputy who offered his support to De Wever in the Chamber of Representatives, as noted above.  Vlaams Belang is a Flemish separatist party that long has had a taint of racism, though its domestic policies are more socially minded than De Wever’s N-VA.

If I may summarize, my reading of the Belgian press demonstrates that opinions are divided on De Wever’s stand with respect to confiscation and on the Ukraine-Russia war, between different newspapers and even within the staff of a single newspaper like L’Echo.

Against this media background in his own country. Bart De Wever’s principled stand against the von der Leyen plan to confiscate Russian state assets in Euroclear is all the more impressive and praiseworthy.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025