The US and EU are applying a new level of economic pressure against Russia: sovereign asset seizure, Nicholas Mulder, assistant professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, writes in a Financial Times opinion piece.
“In a recent discussion paper, the US government supports confiscation as a ‘countermeasure’ for states ‘injured’ and ‘specifically affected’ by Russia’s war. This claim invokes the international legal doctrine of reprisals,” Mulder writes in the piece. “Continued western aid to Ukraine is morally, legally and strategically urgent. Yet as a justification for confiscating Russian state assets, the reprisals argument has three problems: it lacks competent effect, it is being invoked by the wrong parties and it undermines the rules-based order wester governments claim to defend.”
