From chasing yachts to seizing Italian mansions, the global effort to punish Russian oligarchs for their financial ties to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been unprecedented. For its part, the US has set up its own special task force – known as the “KleptoCapture” task force – within the Justice Department to seize the assets of the Russian elite trying to evade sanctions.
“This time, the effort involved in tracking down their assets is much greater,” Timothy Frye, a professor of post-Soviet foreign policy at Columbia University, told CNBC. “It’s going to take a long time to sort through a lot of the dodgy property purchases and the like, but there seems to be some commitment to making it happen.”
But it’s unclear whether the oligarchs will have enough leverage over Putin to end Russia’s ongoing barrage against Ukraine, experts say. Imposing the sanctions on the Russian oligarchs could also prove difficult given the strong US protections for property rights, Douglas Rediker, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CNBC.
“I’m not privy to secret intelligence agencies, but it’s hard to point out the specific connection between at least some of the financial oligarchs and what’s going on in Ukraine at the behest of President Putin,” Rediker explained.
“It doesn’t mean that their behavior was squeaky clean or justifiable, or that they weren’t guilty of a variety of alleged sins,” Rediker said.
Watch the video above to find out how the Russian oligarchs came to power and whether global sanctions on the billionaires could help end the war between Russia and Ukraine.