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Calls grow to seize Russian assets to help pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction

Rogue Valley

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Calls grow to seize Russian assets to help pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction

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4.23.22
Russian President Vladimir Putin has laid waste to entire cities and sparked the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II with his invasion of Ukraine. Now, Ukrainian officials are leading a growing movement calling on the US and its allies to make Russia pay to repair that staggering damage, by seizing the hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian assets frozen by Western sanctions. The money — about $300 billion in Russian central bank foreign reserves and tens of billions of dollars more in oligarch wealth around the world — would be used to rebuild devastated Ukrainian cities, offset the economic damage in the country and elsewhere, compensate families for the death of loved ones, and even pay for weapons to defend against the invasion.“Those monies that were blocked and frozen have to be used to rebuild Ukraine after the war as well as to pay for the losses caused to other nations,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a remote address to world finance officials gathered in Washington on Thursday. “If there is starvation started in some regions [of other countries] due to Russia’s war, those frozen assets can be used to pay for the assistance and compensation.”

He is the latest Ukrainian official to call for seizing Russia’s foreign assets, and is joined by other prominent figures such as Wesley Clark, the former NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe, as well as foreign policy and international finance experts. There also is support in Congress, with several bipartisan bills introduced in recent weeks to help accomplish the goal, which could face legal hurdles because US and international law makes it difficult to seize property of nations and individuals. European officials are looking into the idea of using seized assets for reparations, as well. “We’ve never had a set of war criminals previously who were sufficiently careless as to leave a large amount of wealth in the hands of international counterparties,” said Simon Johnson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a former International Monetary Fund chief economist. “If you have assets in another country and you attack another country, of course you don’t expect to keep your assets, of course you expect to lose them,” Johnson said in an interview. “That’s like driving your car deliberately into a crowd. Of course you have to pay compensation for that.”


Russia is not going to voluntarily pay war reparations to Ukrane. So yes, distribute the frozen Russian funds to Ukraine as partial compensation for war damages.

The Kremlin has to learn that aggressive war is an expensive undertaking.
 
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