To seize the sanctioned assets of wealthy (or even not-wealthy) Russians would also be to concede that those assets are the legitimate property of their putative owners, which the U.S. government should not do. There’s a reason why the new sanctions task force led by the Justice Treasury Department is called “KleptoCapture”—the villas, yachts, apartments, and other expensive accouterments of the Russian elite are purchased with money stolen from the Russian people. Corruption in Russia, according to some estimates, could account for as much as 25 percent of its GNP. Some of that sum comes in the form of bribes, but much of it accrues by skimming off the government budget into private bank accounts—often in Cyprus, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, or other tax havens where neither Western law enforcement nor the Russian mafia state can track it. By seizing and rerouting those stolen funds to Ukraine, the U.S. government would in a sense be retroactively recognizing the very corruption it rightly decries.

None of this is to say that Russia and its leaders shouldn’t remain under sanction. Rather, the frozen fruits of Russian corruption should remain frozen until conditions in Russia permit them to be returned to the Russian people—that is, given back to a democratically legitimate Russian government under the rule of law, and ideally one which has accepted and integrated with the European security order.