G-7 Leaders Meet to Ramp Up New Pressure on Russia

The Group of Seven (G-7) leaders are expected to ratchet up economic and political pressure on Russia when they convene at a summit in Italy later this week, with plans to roll out new loans to Ukraine from frozen Russian assets. They also plan to condemn Moscow’s growing ties to North Korea as well as China’s indirect support of the Russian war machine.

The plans for the upcoming summit, described by current and former officials familiar with draft G-7 communiques circulating among diplomats, are being pushed by embattled Western leaders eager to lock in foreign-policy wins in the face of major election hurdles at home. A G-7 leaders’ summit in 2025 could be drastically different and a lot more fractured depending on how elections go in the United States, United Kingdom, and now France—particularly if former U.S. President Donald Trump beats incumbent President Joe Biden in the U.S. elections in November.

“This is the last time this group will meet in this configuration with these leaders. I think that’s pretty clear,” said Josh Lipsky, a former advisor at the International Monetary Fund and now senior director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. “It all conveys a sense of urgency and the stakes around this G-7.”

The G-7 summit also comes against the backdrop of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza as well as strategic competition between the West and its rivals in Russia and China to curry favor and influence in the so-called global south. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has invited the leaders of at least a dozen non-G-7 countries to the upcoming summit, including Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, India, Kenya, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Biden administration’s top priority for the upcoming summit, which Biden himself is set to attend, is finalizing an agreement to provide around $50 billion in new loans to Ukraine using profits from Russian assets that have been frozen in the Western-dominated international financial system. The proposal has received widespread support in theory among countries opposed to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but it still faces a thicket of complex legal and financial hurdles.

Western countries froze around $280 billion in Russian financial assets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the bulk of which is parked in Belgium, France, and Germany. EU officials have resisted efforts to seize the assets directly, fearing the precedent such a move would set for international markets, but they opened the door to allocating interest generated by these assets to Ukraine. The Biden administration’s plan calls for G-7 countries to issue Ukraine a $50 billion loan, seen as a critical lifeline for the country’s battered wartime economy, which would be paid back over the years by the interest from the frozen Russian assets. Those assets could generate around $2.7 billion to $3.7 billion a year in interest. Biden administration officials are still working to hash out the final details of the plan ahead of the summit.

Alongside this, the G-7 countries—the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—are also expected to issue new statements condemning Russia’s deepening military ties with North Korea and send new warnings to Chinese banks to stop helping Moscow evade Western sanctions lest they face new sanctions themselves, the current and former officials said. The United States has so far avoided sanctioning major Chinese financial institutions, possibly fearing the impact on global financial markets, but Washington could choose to target smaller Chinese banks helping Russia skirt Western sanctions as a calculated response and opening warning shot.

“Our concern is that China is increasingly the factory of the Russian war machine,” Daleep Singh, the White House deputy national security advisor for international economics, said during an event at the Center for a New American Security. “You can call it the ‘arsenal of autocracy’ when you consider [that] Russia’s military ambitions threaten obviously the existence of Ukraine, but [also] increasingly European security, NATO, and trans-Atlantic security.”

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The Biden administration’s push for major deliverables at the upcoming G-7 summit fits into a wider strategy the administration has taken to advance its foreign-policy agenda in more informal and ad hoc groupings of partners and allies as traditional multilateral institutions—such as the United Nations—are stuck in diplomatic gridlock. The administration has advanced its Indo-Pacific strategy through the Quad—a new partnership among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—and security partnerships through the AUKUS arrangement with Australia and the United Kingdom.

While the Biden administration hopes to focus the G-7 summit on rallying more international support for Ukraine, it is also grappling with the ongoing crisis in the Middle East centered on Israel’s war against Hamas. Ongoing U.S. support for Israel in the war as the civilian death toll in Gaza mounts has opened Washington up to widespread criticism and accusations of hypocrisy, particularly from countries in the global south.

Countries including Colombia, Mexico, and Nicaragua have filed to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice over vehement opposition from Israel and the United States. Colombia, Bolivia, and Belize have severed diplomatic ties with Israel, and Brazil has withdrawn its ambassador. Russian state propaganda outlets have seized on the narrative of Western double standards about civilian casualties in Ukraine versus Gaza, and many analysts assess that the conflict in Gaza is aiding the Kremlin’s messaging to the global south on Western hypocrisy.

“The Ukraine war awakened us in the West to the fact that there’s work to do in the global south, but at least then we were on the side of the global majority,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali Italian think tank and former special advisor to the EU’s foreign-policy chief.

“Now with Israel-Gaza, we just basically are in a shrinking minority,” she added. “We’re in a far, far more complicated spot than we were a year ago vis-à-vis the global south … and there’s now this total lack of credibility that the West has to deal with.”