President Zelensky has called for some of the Russian billions seized by world banks to be sent to rebuild Ukraine.
The G7 group is considering taking only the rise in value and interest due since the assets were frozen in 2020.
But the Ukrainian president told the BBC all of the money should be used. “If the world has $300bn - why not use it?”, he said.
The BBC understands central bankers in Europe have concerns over undermining banks’ safe haven status.
Honestly, a regime should have to factor in the risk of losing all their money abroad if they start an illegal war or attempt genocide.
The theory of Europe relying on Russian gas as they joined the world economy was that mutual reliance prevents war because the consequences harm both sides.
Losing assets to the victims of the war you start would be a useful precedent to set and keep. The logic is the same.
The problem is that because sanctions hurt both sides we’re still reluctant to use them.
We should have activated sanctions over the war in Georgia, or the first invasion of Crimea. Eventually we did as Russia marched on another Nation’s capital.
Banks are never going to take an action that harms them. If we want to redirect the seized assets of Russia it will have to be governments which force them.
It does make sense, but if you start down that road, would the rest of the world be justified in seizing US assets to give to Sadam or the Taliban? After all, the invasion of Georgia practically copied the justification for bombing Yugoslavia. Or, where do you draw the line? Remember the last Venezuelan elections, when they declared the other guy the winner and handed him a bunch of gold that was a loan collateral?
But beyond that, the only reason there are any assets to seize is because it’s understood they won’t be seized. Anyone not part of the west is an idiot if they keep relying on anything that depends on being in the west’s good graces. And anyone not an idiot will seek to decouple and construct fallbacks and alternatives, and then any leverage over them is lost.
The problem isn’t “it’s right/wrong to do this”, it’s “will doing this come back to bite me in the ass at a later date?”
The US should definitely have sanctions applied to it when they break international law.
At the moment there isn’t much consideration of “will doing this come back to bite me in the ass at a later date” when a country commits violence or funds a foreign coup.
That’s because there’s too much consideration of “will doing this come back to bite me in the ass at a later date.” When applying sanctions.
If the sanctions were virtually guaranteed to get triggered, the difficult decision would be for the regime doing the wrong thing in the first place.