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What if the Russian asset doesn't want to go to Ukraine, and wants to stay on his Florida golf course instead?
What would Ukraine do with this asset anyway?
Load it into a catapult?
Into a trebuchet
Fetcher la vache.
Quoi?
Yeah.. I of course 100% want Ukraine to win the war, but this is a bad precedent to set if any of the frozen assets are from civilians who aren't aiding or even APPROVE OF Putin's war crimes. .
If Ukraine can just confiscate civilian Russian funds that have been frozen, what's to stop Israel from taking the money of Gazan or Lebanese civilians? Or even Iranian ones?
What's stopping them now?
Freezing assets is generally used as diplomatic leverage. When there is no more leverage to be had, seizure follows. In WW2, the Western Allies seized the assets of foreign nationals deemed too close to the governments of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
What's stopping them now?
The fact that they don't have access to them. I don't know exactly how frozen assets work, but I'm 99% certain that hostile or even neutral governments don't just get to spend them as if they were their own.
In WW2, the Western Allies seized the assets of foreign nationals deemed too close to the governments of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
And the Western Allies also carpet bombed the civilians of the Dresden city center with incendiary bombs and needlessly dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Just because the right side of a war does something doesn't necessarily make it the right thing to do.
The fact that they don’t have access to them. I don’t know exactly how frozen assets work, but I’m 99% certain that hostile or even neutral governments don’t just get to spend them as if they were their own.
Laws are like Calvinball - it's made up as you go along, and only the willingness of other parties to humor you is what sustains it. In the case of nations that are outright hostile to one another, only the balance of power and the perceived likelihood of a return to normal relations prevents seizures. As Russia has seized Western property in the country, we can't be accused of firing the first metaphorical shot - as the money is proposed to go directly to Ukraine's war effort, there's little room for serious accusations of opportunistic profiteering.
And the Western Allies also carpet bombed the civilians of the Dresden city center with incendiary bombs and needlessly dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Just because the right side of a war does something doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing to do.
Straying away from the wider issue of terror bombing and the atomic bombings, my point is that there is precedent for this behavior. It's not new or unheard of, it's not opening Pandora's Box. It's what countries that are openly hostile to each other with little hope for reconciliation do.
Britain bombed Dresden for three days, Germany used incendiary bombs in London, Coventry and Birmingham for three years.
Yeah, because "nazis did worse" is a great fucking excuse for crimes against humanity 🙄
well after all lots of Russian oligarch yachts have already been seized, so... might as well melt them down for slag and heave them at the Russians
The precedence it might set would be that tomorrow China might take out its assets from US and call for payments for the debt causing crash which might rival 1929.
Frozen assets can be transferred and have been transferred. But it is not the norm and not done in haste.
