. Overall, the seized assets are worth an estimated $635 million—a drop in the bucket for people worth billions of dollars.
While sanctions haven’t hit oligarchs’ pocketbooks very much, they have had an impact by physically cutting them off from their luxury possessions in the West. When calculating the net worth of Russian billionaires,“The likelihood of the West ever lifting the current sanctions is very, very low,” says Winkler, the sanctions lawyer.
The most high-profile targets of Western sanctions have been the oligarchs’ palatial superyachts. But detaining these vessels doesn’t come cheap. Many were held in Mediterranean and Caribbean ports in the weeks after the war began and have been slowly decaying ever since, racking up tens of millions of dollars in bills that governments need to pay to keep them afloat.
“None of the vessels affected actually have any financial value to their respective owners. Whether seized or merely detained, they can no longer function as a yacht,” says Benjamin Maltby, a partner at London-based law firm Keystone Law who focuses on superyachts. “They can’t be used as a form of transport or a platform for recreation and they can’t be sold by their owners. These are assets which are physically deteriorating.
When it comes to bank accounts and stakes in companies, the value of the frozen assets is much larger. Within a month of the invasion,estimated that sanctions had hit more than $23 billion in assets belonging to Russian billionaires, including homes, yachts and jets. Last month, afrom the U.S.-led Russian Elites, Proxies and Oligarchs Task Force—which includes the U.S., U.K.