What is being talked about is sending the frozen assets of one country and sending them to another country. That's theft. I see a lot of similarity with what Trudeau tried to do to the Trucker Convoys in Canada.
Its foolish to think doing so wouldn't be grounds for war.
One can make an argument re: Russian Oligarchs own those assets, buts that is for the Russian people to resolve what to do with the money.
I agree completely. It is a different thing entirely, and theft and all the rest.
I guess I’m fed up with needless wars that do us and the people of the country involved more harm than good, and this one really takes the cake. Had we held both sides’ feet to fire to implement the Minsk Accord, Putin would had no support for this invasion. (To be fair, I think that was Trump’s intention, but Russia-Russia-Russia and the impeachment debacle prevented him.)
It’s what the majority of the Ukrainian people wanted, too. Zelensky ran on a peace ticket and got 70% of the vote. When he went to the Donbas area as newly-elected president to remonstrate with AZOV about their noncompliance re taking steps to begin to implement Minsk, they mocked him. The video was painful to watch. It may well have been theater (”See, guys, I tried, but Azov wouldn’t let me”), who knows? Whatever, after that, no more talk of Minsk. Along with the Pandora Papers revelations, the “populist president” saw his popularity fall into the 20th percentile — until Putin’s ill-conceived invasion.
Nuland and Sullivan and others in Biden’s circle of key appointees were positively slavering for this (so was Hillary — if they’d run a three-legged blind possum against her I would have voted for it for that reason alone).
So here we are. When elephants fight, the grass suffers. The Ukrainian people are suffering.
China is making out like a bandit, investing their gains in R&D in the race to come out on top in the Fourth Industrial Revolution*. Meanwhile, we’re throwing billions into a sinkhole of destruction and corruption while fuel prices soar, we suck our reserves dry, global food stocks are at an all-time low, the supply chain is broken, the dollar erodes and our mush-headed president plays rattle-the-sabre with two nuclear-armed powers.
None of the above excuses Putin’s actions, of course.
* https://dc.claremont.org/how-america-can-lose-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/