We Can Force Russia to Fund Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom
cepa.org
Imagine the lunacy whereby Western taxpayers have committed billions of dollars of their own money to aid Ukraine’s victory, only to lose it.

While the necessity of supporting Ukraine, at all costs, should be obvious to all (it’s the best long-term investment the West can make against an expansionist Russia), it is a hard sell to electorates. But there is another way of doing this — we can make Putin pay. Even the populists in Europe and the U.S. would struggle to argue with that.

The West holds $400bn of Russian assets, either frozen or immobilized For comparison, all Western aid so far, including financial, humanitarian, and military, totals about $350bn.

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    17•1 year ago

    As an additional detail, Putin apparently did all he could to avoid seizures at least of his personal assets as he ordered to move superyacht from a German shipyard to Russia just weeks before he ordered the invasion of Ukraine:

    A Russian anti-corruption organisation set up by the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny claims emails show that the Russian president ordered the urgent moving of the 82-metre superyacht, called Graceful, from a shipyard in Hamburg, where it was undergoing a $32m refit […]

    Photos show the ship being towed out of Hamburg on 7 February en route to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad […]

    […] on 22 February – Putin ordered the full-blown invasion of Ukraine. After the invasion, the US, UK and EU imposed sanctions on Russian-owned assets overseas, and dozens of oligarch-owned superyachts were seized across the world.