Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has proposed the confiscation of Russian-owned properties, as part of broad sanctions in response to Moscow’s attack on Ukraine.
“We want to raise the issue of how Poland could freeze and confiscate Russian assets in our country,” Morawiecki told Sunday’s Wprost magazine. “On the one hand, we have constitutional limitations for actions related to property rights. And, on the other hand, more and more Poles don’t understand why, if Italians confiscate the yachts of Russian oligarchs, we can’t do the same in our country.”
Morawiecki added that “there is some real estate, and financial assets, the shares in companies that we should seize.”
The prime minister said he plans to work to have the new law passed in the Sejm, the lower house of the country’s parliament.
Morawiecki, who met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week, has been calling for a total economic blockade of Russia and for Europe to completely relinquish energy supplies from Moscow. “I appeal to the German, the French and Benelux elites to put aside their calculators and start using their consciences. Because if we’re calculating the cost of gas and oil, it means we’re dealing in the blood of Ukrainian children, women and soldiers,” the prime minister said.