this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on Ukraine’s partners to create a legal framework for the use of frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine.

Source: Volodymyr Zelenskyy on X (Twitter)

Quote: "The decision to use frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine will be an entirely just and legitimate response to Russia's aggression against Ukraine. It will send the right message to all would-be aggressors around the world: attacking another state does not pay off; it makes the aggressor pay. I encourage partners to move quickly on relevant legal frameworks. This year, we must achieve tangible progress toward using frozen Russian assets for the benefit of Ukraine. We firmly rely on G7 leadership on this matter."

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.