By Jim Geraghty
Monday, March
21, 2022
I’m all for seizing yachts and properties,
freezing financial assets, sanctioning, and generally making life miserable for
Russian oligarchs close to Putin. They’ve feasted on Russia’s economic and
natural resources for three decades, all the while obeying and enabling a
malevolent thug’s ruthless pursuit of ever-expanding power. It is good to send
these men a clear signal that their time of feasting is over and that none of
them are safe from the consequences of their actions.
But it is likely an American misperception
to think that the oligarchs have a power base independent of Putin, or that
they are likely to go to Putin and pressure him to stop the invasion of
Ukraine. The oligarchs are in the positions they’re in precisely because
they’re the last people in the world who would ever stand up to Putin.
Pressuring the oligarchs to change Putin’s
mind is like pressuring the Dallas Cowboys ticket-sales manager to change team
owner Jerry Jones’s mind. Could it theoretically happen? Sure, but it is
extremely unlikely.
If you’ll pardon one more quote from Fiona
Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s biography of Putin, Mr. Putin:
Operative in the Kremlin:
The
special closed world of the oligarchs at the core of Putin’s informal system
echoes the relationship between the tsar and his elite servitors. Neither the
current crony oligarchs nor the original post-Soviet oligarchs are oligarchs in
the Western sense. They are not a single group or even a set of groups with an
independent base of power. They are all part of Putin’s one-boy network. They
do not jockey for power with Putin, although they do clearly try to get access
to the person of the president to transmit their views and concerns and have
some influence over his decisions. As in earlier, historical versions of this
system, their positions and status are entirely dependent on Putin. So is the
oligarchs’ property — it is a privilege that flows from their relationship with
the president. As president, Putin protects the oligarchs and his inner circle.
The oligarchs steward and manage the key sectors of the Russian economy. They
pay formal taxes and also deliver tribute to Putin and the state through the
informal systems of taxation. They prosper because they deliver and precisely
because they have Putin’s protection.
Putin’s’
informal, unofficial system and the formal world of the state apparatus both
depend upon unity of command. Putin may have rejected the idea of a unipolar
world dominated by the rules and institutions of the United States and its
Western allies, but he is very much a unipolar president. Others can bring
ideas to the table and criticize the president during the deliberative part of
the policy process, but his word is final. What he says, goes, once the
decision is made. . . . In Putin’s conceptualization of himself as CEO of
Russia, Inc., and in his conceptualization of the vertikal vlasti”
— a top-down, strict chain of command — “everyone beneath him is an operational
manager. They implement, they do not set the strategic direction.”
According to
an anecdote described by Ben Mezrich, author of Once Upon a
Time in Russia, a profile of Russia’s oligarchs written in 2015, Putin established
who was boss practically from Day One:
In the
first week, Putin invited all of the oligarchs out to Stalin’s old house. This
is a place where there’s like bullet holes in the walls where people used to
get lined up and shot. He had all the oligarchs sit down at a table. He got up
in front of them, and he said, you’ve all made tons of money. You’ve all done really,
really well. You can keep your money. But from here on out, you stay out of my
way. All the oligarchs who stayed out of his way are the oligarchs who are
around today doing very well, and the oligarchs who did not, who spoke up, all
died or were exiled — were found hanging in their bathroom or fell down an
elevator shaft or fell out of a helicopter. It was not good business going up
against Putin. Putin very quickly became the most powerful oligarch of all.
Mezrich says the oligarchs probably secretly
think the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a disaster, but he doubts that they’ll
stand up to the Russian leader much:
Putin is
so powerful. He’s weeded out everyone who’s an enemy. The oligarchs who remain
are utterly loyal to him, and, honestly, very afraid of him. . . . These
sanctions, I think, are pretty intricate when they go after these people who
have so little to gain from what’s going on right now and have everything to
lose. I do think you’re seeing cracks appear, and I do think as a class, the oligarchs
want this war to end.
But there’s little reason to think that
Putin respects the opinions of these men, much less that he will listen when
their advice is contrary to his desires. Last week in a speech, Putin sneered
that Western powers are betting “on national traitors — on those who earn money here, with us, but
live there”:
[The West]
will try to bet on the so-called fifth column, on national traitors, on those
who earn money here, with us, but live there, and “live” not even in the
geographical sense of the word, but in their own way. thoughts, in his slavish
consciousness. I am not at all judging those who have a villa in Miami or the
French Riviera, who cannot do without foie gras, oysters or so-called gender
freedoms. The problem is absolutely not in this, but, I repeat, in the fact
that many of these people, by their very nature, are mentally located precisely
there, and not here, not with our people, not with Russia. This is what they
think — in their opinion! — a sign of belonging to a higher caste, to a higher
race. Such people are ready to sell their own mother, if only they were allowed
to sit in the hallway of this very highest caste. They want to be like her,
imitating her in every possible way. But they forget or do not understand at
all that if they are needed by this so-called higher caste, then as expendable
material in order to use them to inflict maximum damage on our people.
The U.S. and its allies are putting a lot
of effort into squeezing these oligarchs, creating “Task Force Kleptocapture.” In fact, the Department of the Treasury has the authority to offer
rewards of up to $5 million for “information
leading to seizure, forfeiture or repatriation of stolen assets, linked to corruption involving the government of the Russian
Federation.” The department has a list of 50 targets and it has publicly released 28 names of
individuals from the list who have been
sanctioned by multiple jurisdictions. These include the U.S., Australia,
Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K. who are teaming up with the
U.S. on the asset hunt.
At least some of the oligarchs are likely
to respond to their predicament by running away. As Putin pledged a “cleansing”
of Russian society, at least four
private jets flew from Moscow to Dubai. (A friend of mine who was in Dubai last week said his high-end hotel
was full of Russians.)
Meanwhile, there’s an
excellent chance that those seized yachts will fall into disrepair while in
government custody, because the government doesn’t want to
use taxpayer dollars for maintenance on some corrupt rich bastard’s yacht, and
the corrupt rich bastard doesn’t want to pay for maintenance on a yacht that he
can’t use. A wiser, faster-moving government would quickly auction off the
seized yachts to raise funds for victims of the war.
If the U.S. government and its allies want
to seize the assets of corrupt men who profited from relationships with a
brutal, autocratic regime, they should go right ahead. There’s some grim
satisfaction in demonstrating to these men the ways in which Putin cannot
protect them, and that being a yes-man to a malevolent dictator carries a heavy
price. But we shouldn’t have any illusions that doing this is likely to
pressure Putin to change his mind.
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