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00:00 European Union leaders are discussing a plan today to use billions of euros in
00:03 frozen profits from frozen Russian financial assets to buy arms for Ukraine
00:09 as they try to bolster Kiev. The bloc's 27 national leaders also to debate how
00:13 Europe can do more to defend itself and boost its own arms industry, reflecting
00:17 fears that Russia may not stop at Ukraine and the US may not be such a
00:21 staunch protector of Europe in the future.
00:25 I hope that we can reach an agreement soon and change banknotes into weapons
00:33 because your soldiers don't fight with banknotes. They need physical arms. They
00:39 need physical instruments in order to defend your people.
00:43 Josep Borrell there. Well let's have the latest then from Brussels. Here's our
00:47 correspondent there, Dave Keating.
00:53 The 27 national EU leaders will today be discussing a proposal from the European
00:59 Commission that came out yesterday to confiscate the windfall profits from
01:03 seized Russian assets. Now this isn't seizing the entirety of the 210 billion
01:10 euros that are held in Europe from the Russian Central Bank. This is only taking
01:15 the windfall profits, basically the interest that that money generates, and
01:20 giving it to Ukraine. The big controversy has been that some countries don't want
01:25 that money spent on weapons. So that's the neutral countries, Austria and the
01:30 islands of Malta, Cyprus and Ireland, and also the more Russia-leaning countries,
01:35 Hungary and Slovakia, which say that continuing to arm Ukraine is
01:39 unnecessarily prolonging the war. And so yesterday we saw this proposal adjusted
01:44 that only 90% of those proceeds will go toward weapons and the other 10% will go
01:49 toward the Ukrainian budget. So we'll see today if that's enough to convince
01:54 those wavering countries. The thing is, even that 90% is going toward the
01:57 European Peace Facility, which is the facility that's already been set up to
02:02 send EU money to buy weapons for Ukraine that's bought on national level. That's
02:07 already been adjusted for the neutral countries to make sure that countries
02:11 like Ireland, which are constitutionally forbidden from participating in war,
02:15 aren't sending weapons but are actually sending other types of things. Now I'm
02:19 being told we shouldn't expect a resolution on this today because there's
02:23 a lot of legal issues here. You might be asking why don't they just confiscate
02:27 the entire 210 million euros that is being held here. Well that's because EU
02:32 countries, particularly here in Belgium where a lot of that money is, are worried
02:36 about the legal challenges to that that actually eventually that would work its
02:40 way through international courts and they would have to give that money back
02:43 with interest. So it would actually end up costing the EU countries money to
02:47 have made this legal mistake. They're still a little worried even about
02:50 taxing these windfall profits so they need lawyers to look into this but
02:53 they'll discuss it today. The big issue today will be the principle of whether
02:57 or not these neutral and Russia friendly countries can tolerate the money going
03:02 toward weapons.