Timothy Ash, Associate Fellow at the UK think tank Chatham House, has penned an opinion piece for the Kyiv Independent recommending that Ukraine's allies move to confiscate frozen Russian assets and transfer them to Ukraine.
Ash begins with a suggestive bit of arithmetic: he calculates the total amount of frozen Russian assets (including oligarch assets) as $400 billion. A figure close to the World Bank's figure of $486 billion - the estimate of the damage caused by the Russian invasion.
Ash is aware that there is huge pressure on the EU not to confiscate frozen Russian assets. Politico and Bloomberg have given space to the protests from Saudi Arabia, China and other global actors.
In the next section "Why have these assets not already been seized and allocated to Ukraine?", Ash attempts to undermine objections - legal and political - to the seizure of Russian assets. This is followed by the "utilitarian" argument of the next section "What's the alternative?" - that regardless of the legal precedents to be set, Ukraine's allies cannot allow Russia to win.
Read and listen to the entire piece here.
Sources: Kyiv Independent, Politico, Bloomberg
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