There's a certain irony in picking this high horse to ride, when we're taking about the response to a western european ground-war in the year 2022.

As if that's not evidence of far more barbaric mechanisms at play in geopolitics...

Has stealing random stuff from Russians helped? I'm not a maritime lawyer or an expert on how war in the 2020s looks, but I don't think Russia was sailing troops into the Ukraine on billionaire pleasure yachts.

There is a pretty good chance this is just making people feel bad and making it harder to normalise the situation. This is action is literally not helping, and is a breach of good norms against stealing. It means the Russian billionaires will be forced to spend more of their money in Russia and have a great reason to bear a grudge against the more Western powers.

I wouldn't call it stealing so much as temporarily seizing stolen property. The oligarch's live on almost exclusively ill-gotten gains.

> It means the Russian billionaires will be forced to spend more of their money in Russia and have a great reason to bear a grudge against the more Western powers.

Any Russian billionaires that don't realize that this is more of Putin's incompetence than western antagonism deserve a random punitive gesture.

In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.

I'm still not following. How do you think this has helped the situation? What do you expect to happen differently in the future that will be to our benefit?

Maybe I've missed out on some life experiences, but I've never seen petty theft help defuse a tense situation. It is not going to be beneficial to achieving a sane outcome.

> In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.

This is wishful thinking. All of the thievery was done by NATO - there is a very high chance that they will identify NATO as the threat to them.

And if they do blame Putin (which I think is unlikely, groups tend to close ranks when threatened) how is that supposed to help? What are the billionaires supposed to do that the Ukraine military or US State Department can't do? Billionaires aren't that big compared to a government military.

Why would you expect your day to day interactions to act as framework for how members of a warring nation displacing millions and killing innocents under the guise of "nazi hunting" should react to things?

And you're vehemently argue against points that have been known for months, the oligarchs are deeply unhappy with Putin over what has happened: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/29/russia-oliga...

Putin may have them under his thumb, but that doesn't mean they should be left to their comfort rather than forced to face the direct consequences of Putin's actions.

1. You're linking the Washington Post. Do you want me to go find an article on RT that says the Oligarchs are united against the US? That is a long article claiming to know things that they can't and don't know and is political propaganda to help push this terrifying US proxy war.

2. What do you expect to happen here? How do you think these thefts have helped the situation? Even if you want to argue that these people now hate Putin, they are powerless. The west just stripped them of all their assets.