How to Get Russia’s Billions to Ukraine

I spent four years in Belgium when I was supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It is a complicated nation, split in two by religion and language. My military headquarters was at Mons, in the French-speaking, largely Catholic South rather than the Dutch-speaking, Protestant North. The cosmopolitan capital, Brussels, hosts the overall headquarters of both NATO and the European Union.

Brussels was ground zero of the Wars of the Reformation between Catholics and Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Today, there is another kind of geopolitical fault line emerging. In the halls of the European Union, the leadership is working to take advantage of large deposits of Russian Central Bank funds — over $300 billion globally — that have been frozen in Western institutions since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But agreement has been elusive, thanks in large part to the Belgians themselves.