Friends + Interlocutors,

Interesting article in yesterday's Financial Times. Estonia, that little Baltic country that used to be under the wing of Russia, on and off for centuries, is proposing that Russian assets which the EU has seized in response to the Russo-Ukraine war, be pocketed, seized for good. It occurs to me, wouldn’t that be piracy, outright theft? 

At the moment, these assets—including $300 billion of foreign exchange reserves of the Russian central bank--are held in a kind of limbo, under the Diktat of EU/US sanctions, with the pirates collecting the interest. Again, I ask, isn’t this robbery? What could possibly be the legal basis for it in international law? 

If the EU and the USA want to declare war on Russia, fine, that’s another scenario. In that case, as in World War II when assets of Germany and Japan were frozen, Russian assets would be sequestered until the end of the conflict. Diplomatic relations would be cut off. But of course there is no rational reason for the U.S. to declare war on Russia.

Papa Joe Biden and his sleazy, mendacious foreign policy team did not officially break off diplomatic relations with Russia. However, they stopped all communication with the Kremlin. President Biden never picked up the phone to talk with Putin. As a practical matter, Biden’s team may have realized that Biden was not up to it. And they enjoyed running the show themselves.  

In the current case, Washington and the European Union have seized Russian assets because Washington and the EU have taken Ukraine’s side in a border conflict…a war which, never forget, the neocon/neoliberal foreign policy masterminds in Washington brought about with the goal to destabilize Russia and perhaps bring about regime change. 

If all the behind-the-scenes machinations and treachery by Washington to instigate said conflict under Bush II and Barack Obama were widely known, Europeans and Americans might recoil in horror from such folly. It might result in something like the French Revolution. The tributary “elites” of Germany, France and England were co-conspirators along with Washington.

Before I forget, what about all those fantastic super yachts owned by Russian oligarchs? They too have been seized at the direction of Washington. We are talking about private property owned by Russian billionaires. I repeat, private property. The rationale is, these billionaires must be friends of Putin, otherwise how could they afford to order the made-in-Germany mega yachts by Lürssen? 

Here we have a genuine act of world-wide piracy harkening back to the golden age of piracy in the 18th century.  Somebody is paying to maintain these yachts in captivity. I think some have even been sold.

In the meantime, according to the FT article, the EU decided to loan money to Ukraine, using the seized Russian assets as convoluted collateral. Can you believe it? If you want to do something really stupid, do it. Don’t look afterwards for an easy way out which only compounds the problem. 

No doubt this European loan arrangement for funding the proxy war against Russia is one of the reasons Kremlin advisor Sergey Karaganov has concluded that the European elites must be “insane”. I wouldn’t go that far. Europe has simply been led astray by Washington’s foreign policy establishment for many decades. Well, in retrospect, perhaps that serial fatheadedness does constitutes a form of insanity.

Patrick

=====