Vladimir Putin is going on a property hunt, ordering officials to find Russian assets that once belonged to its former empire or were owned by the Soviet Union.
An order from the Russian president published late Thursday allocated funding for a state unit to conduct searches for property abroad and ensure Russia’s ownership rights are registered. The document didn’t indicate the size of the budget for the operation or what kinds of property are being sought.
While it’s unclear what prompted the order, Putin’s interest in former imperial possessions is unlikely to ease concerns about his ambitions among neighboring states after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended European security.
At its peak, the Russian Empire extended into territories of modern Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Finland. It dissolved under the pressure of World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution led by Vladimir Lenin that marked the birth of the Communist state.
He’s mad that there’s a move afoot to sell seized Russian assets and use the proceeds to fund Ukraine’s defense. The signal is: if you buy these things (yachts, real estate, whatever) Russia will see to it as a matter of official policy that you will fall carelessly out of a high window somewhere. The quiet part said out loud, tho, is that Russia now claims that anything it ever held, whether as the USSR or imperial Russia, or the current Russian Federation, is theirs forever no takebacks.
Basically the read on this should be: Russia is having trouble laundering rubles into non-sanctioned currencies (those foreign assets are basically conduits to do that) and is now saying essentially that if they can’t keep our offshore loot they’ll just seize all of Eastern Europe and demand tribute from their vassal territories
…of course, if Russia could actually do any of that it already would have