That’s what’s in the REPO Act, or Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act, which is included in the latest Ukrainian aid package.

It encourages Mr Biden to transfer frozen Russian reserves to a trust fund for Ukraine.

Those frozen assets amount to some $300 billion, globally. Count on Biden, though, to decline to be encouraged.

He won’t touch those frozen assets. He’s already been…encouraged…by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to slow-walk delivery of the weapons Ukraine needs actually to defeat the barbarian and drive him back out of Ukraine. He’s already been…encouraged…by Putin to deny altogether other weapons that would facilitate a Ukrainian outright victory.

Biden has—supposedly—been working on lending money to Ukraine that’s based on the interest accruing on all those frozen Russian assets. As Robert Zoellick put it in his op-ed at the link above, though,

Washington, London, and Ottawa should instead transfer all the frozen Russian assets in their currencies worldwide to a trust fund for Ukraine while urging Europeans to act when they can agree. If Europeans won’t use Russian assets, they can’t expect others to keep paying. After all, the war is in Europe.

Indeed.

Berlin and Paris have been the principal obstacles. Washington can assuage their anxieties.

Don’t bother. If Germany and France wish to render themselves irrelevant to the barbarian’s annihilative war, honor their desire. Move on without them, and move on with those eastern Europe nations still fresh from under the barbarian’s jackboots, Poland and the Baltic States especially, along with newly alert Finland and Sweden.

Turn as much of those $300 billion as are in the direct or indirect jurisdiction of the US and others at least nominally interested in crushing the barbarian’s invasion (if not the barbarian himself) into that trust fund, or better, into a fund on which Ukraine can draw directly, at need. And make the weapons Ukraine might wish to buy or lend/lease available for immediate sale/borrow/lease and delivery in the numbers Ukraine needs.