Ukraine’s AfD Insurance Policy
Confiscating Russia’s frozen assets could secure Ukraine’s defence against a future withdrawal of German support. A commentary by Sir William Browder
On Sunday the Alternative for Germany won 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the strongest result any far-right party has achieved in a German state election since the Second World War. It took 39 of the 83 seats, three short of an outright majority.
In Berlin the result is being called an earthquake. In Kyiv it is being read as a countdown.
I have spent the better part of two decades fighting Vladimir Putin. He does not need to win elections in other people’s countries. He only needs to wait for them.
The AfD has never hidden what it would do. Its programme calls for an end to military aid to Ukraine, an end to sanctions on Russia and the reopening of the Nord Stream pipelines.
In June the party’s foreign policy spokesman flew to St Petersburg, against the explicit advice of the German foreign ministry, and met the head of Gazprom and one of Putin’s senior envoys to discuss restarting Russian gas.
Putin’s envoy posted afterwards that he looked forward to building a great future together with the AfD. None of this is a secret. It is a manifesto.
Yes, this is one German state, and German foreign policy is not made at state level. Now the uncomfortable part.
The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, polling around 28 per cent nationally, ahead of the chancellor’s own party. It leads the polls in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which votes on 20 September.
German politics rests on what Germans call the firewall: an agreement among the mainstream parties never to govern with the AfD. It is still standing.
But it now has to hold back a party that has just come first by more than two to one. Firewalls like that do not hold forever.
So think about what happens when it fails. Germany is the largest funder of Ukraine’s defence in Europe. If Germany walks away, the rest of the EU cannot make up the difference. It has neither the money nor the cohesion.
Ukraine could not pay its soldiers or buy its weapons. Putin would win the war.
He would not stop there. Putin needs a war. It is what holds his system together. This is Machiavelli 101. A ruler in trouble at home finds an enemy abroad.
He also knows that losing power in Russia does not mean retirement. It means his life. So after Ukraine he would move on a Baltic state or Poland, and if we honour our NATO obligations we would be at war with Russia. Not a proxy war. Ours.
We have watched this film once already. Donald Trump rode the same wave of anger among working people, made the same promises about ending military support for Ukraine. He won and then delivered.
Washington stopped paying for Ukraine’s defence. American weapons still arrive, but Europe writes the cheque. Ukraine is still standing because Europe stepped in when America stepped back. There is nobody to step in for Europe.
Seen that way, Putin’s strategy is rational. He absorbs catastrophic losses because he is not fighting for territory. He is waiting for our ballot boxes to give him what his army cannot take.
Sunday told him the waiting is working.
There is a way to take that weapon out of his hands, and it is not complicated.
At the start of the war Europe froze around 210 billion euros of Russian state assets, most of it at Euroclear in Brussels. It is still there.
In December, EU leaders had the chance to put it to work and flinched, because Belgium wanted guarantees nobody would give.
So rather than spend Russia’s money, Europe borrowed 90 billion euros of its own, against its own budget, to carry Ukraine through 2027. Officials now concede it will not stretch that far.
Consider what that did. It put European taxpayers on the hook, left Putin’s money untouched, and made Ukraine’s survival depend on national budgets and EU votes that the AfD, the National Rally and their friends fully intend to control.
The alternative is to confiscate those assets outright and place them in a supranational fund for Ukraine’s defence, created by international agreement and ring-fenced from any single government.
Not a loan against the money. Not the interest on it. The money.
Once it is in that fund, no chancellor in Berlin and no president in Paris can switch it off. It would arm Ukraine for years, and it would destroy Putin’s most reliable strategy at a stroke.
I proposed exactly this in the United States before the last presidential election. I called it Ukraine’s Trump insurance. Nobody listened, and we are all now paying for the policy we declined to buy.
We are sleepwalking towards disaster, and we are doing it with our eyes open. We know who is coming. We know what they will do when they arrive. We still have the money and we still have the time.
We should take out the insurance while we can.
A previous version of this article was published by the British daily The Independent
IEP Bocconi does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
