What’s stopping us from targeting these 20,000 hyper-rich Russians? Western elites
The Ukrainian crisis has revived an old debate: how to effectively sanction a state like Russia? Let’s say it straight away: it is time to imagine a new type of sanction focused on the oligarchs who have prospered thanks to the regime in question. This will require the establishment of an international financial register, which will not be to the liking of western fortunes, whose interests are much more closely linked to those of the Russian and Chinese oligarchs than is sometimes claimed. However, it is at this price that western countries will succeed in winning the political and moral battle against the autocracies and in demonstrating to the world that the resounding speeches on democracy and justice are not simply empty words.
Let us first recall that the freezing of assets held by Putin and his relatives is already part of the arsenal of sanctions that have been tried for several years. The problem is that the freezes applied so far remain largely symbolic. They only concern a few dozen people, and can be circumvented by using nominees, especially as nothing has been done to systematically measure and cross-reference the real estate and financial portfolios held by each of them.
The US and its allies are now considering fully disconnecting Russia from the Swift financial network, which would deprive Russian banks of access to the international system for financial transactions and money transfers. The problem is that such a measure is very poorly targeted. Just as with conventional trade sanctions, which after the 2014 crisis were largely instrumentalised by the government to strengthen its grip, the risk would be to impose considerable costs on ordinary Russian and western businesses, with adverse consequences for
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