The best way to punish Putin is to stop obsessing about him and win the war
Kaya Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, is imploring bigger countries to seize $300 billion-worth of frozen Russian assets to rebuild Ukraine before Donald Trump gets the chance to become US president again.
So what? It’s the right thing to do, and not just because Trump is close to Putin. It’s the most effective course of action available to democratic governments seeking to punish Putin for the death last Friday of Alexei Navalny.
Retribution for Navalny requires
- money;
- weapons; and
- a new way of thinking about Ukraine.
All these approaches are more directly concerned with Ukraine than Navalny, and that’s appropriate for two reasons:
i) Putin’s crimes against those who’ve dared to challenge him at home are terrible, but they are dwarfed by those inflicted on Ukrainian civilians, 10,000 of whom have been killed by Russian soldiers and munitions in the past two years; the people of Mariupol, 500,000 of whom have seen their city flattened by Russian ordnance; Ukrainian children, 19,000 of whom have been abducted to Russia; and over 200 Ukrainian political prisoners, 20 of whom are said to be in critical condition in Russian jails.
ii) Putin’s punishment. He’s so well-protected by concentric circles of securocrats and sycophants with a vested interest in his survival that the only way to secure justice for any of his crimes is through comprehensive military defeat.
To that end the rebuilding of Ukraine and its defensive capabilities has to start without waiting for peace.
Reparations. Lawrence Summers and Robert Zoellick, two titans of macroeconomics, wrote presciently last year that Ukraine could win battles and still lose the war. That is doubly evident now, and it’s the reason the UK’s David Cameron as well as Kallas are pushing to seize as well as freeze overseas-held sovereign Russian funds. Japan and the EU worry this would set a dangerous precedent but Summers and Zoellick argue that
- the UN has explicitly called for Russia to “bear the legal consequences of its internationally wrongful acts,” including by paying reparations;
- there are no due process concerns because a state is not a person under US law, so the property being taken isn’t private;
- there is precedent, in the form of $50 billion in Iraqi funds seized by US presidential executive order in 1992 to help rebuild Kuwait; and
- there is no fear of repeating one of the great mistakes of history because unlike Germany after WW1, Russia is afloat on a rising tide of oil and gas earnings.
Weapons. That money is funding a war effort with which the West has to compete if Navalny and Putin’s other victims are to be avenged and the world returned to something like a rules-based order. Europe can no longer count on the US or the EU for the necessary finance, which is why it’s significant that Germany, France and the UK have announced bilateral military aid packages for Ukraine in recent days worth around €13 billion in total.
It won’t be enough. US analysts reckon Ukraine’s best chance of reversing Russia’s slowly gathering momentum lies in hunkering down for a full year, rebuilding its strength and counter-attacking with overwhelming force at carefully chosen points on the front line in the spring of 2025.
A new mindset on its allies’ part would help. As long as western thinkers assume the outcome of the war depends on who sits in the Kremlin, they unconsciously buy into the Kremlin’s view of the two countries as one. That is not Ukraine’s view of its own history, nor the key to victory.
The best way to punish Putin for killing Navalny is to stop obsessing about Putin.
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