Making Russia Pay for Reconstruction
Rebuilding Ukraine with frozen Russian foreign currency reserves can set a precedent for rebuilding other war torn states.
Nato should immediately form a commission with the purpose of tallying up Russian damages to Ukraine, to be paid out through frozen Russian foreign currency reserves. About $350 billion dollars of these reserves have now been frozen by, among others, France, Japan, Germany, and the United States. So, the means exist to rebuild Ukraine while fully compensating its victims, and a convincing case for their compensation can be easily constructed. All that is needed is a legal mechanism for awarding compensation that might be recognized as fair and just by the international community.
The commission should include in its running tally compensation for destroyed buildings and damaged infrastructure. But it should also include the costs of Ukraine’s defense and those associated with refugee travel and resettlement. It should include lost lifetime wages in case of death and lifetime healthcare costs in case of disability. And it should include compensation for emotional damages associated with war trauma and the loss of loved ones. It should include damage to the value of Ukraine’s currency and its investment climate as well as compensation for unborn future generations of Ukrainians, who are likely to suffer as a result of the invasion.
In short, Russia should be charged so much that when Ukrainians are asked about the damage they inflicted, they should feel that, while nothing can replace what is lost, they have been justly compensated. And when we worry for the future of Ukraine, our only fear should be that they might mismanage their inheritance, so to speak. But the payout should extend beyond Ukraine to the international community. Russia should pay for the arms that were required to defend Ukraine. And they should compensate the human rights advocates who tallied up their war crimes, the humanitarian volunteers who took care of Ukrainian refugees, and the very accountants and lawyers taking stock of what Russia owes.
The commission should be made up of an array of states demonstrating broad global support for the project. This should include Nato states, but also an array of democracies from Latin America, East Asia, and Africa. And it should include non-democracies that have demonstrated support the international system, along with stable and relatively decent autocracies like Jordan. The commission should keep a running estimate of reparations in order to accustom Russia to the idea that they will be paying for their damages and to disincentivize their bombardment of cities and attacks on civilians. And it should periodically announce its estimates with every new attack.
Russia may be lawless under Putin, but Putin’s will might still be bent to the law, which need only be created where it does not yet exist. In this way, the commission would represent a major leap forward in international law, and it would set a precedent for other would be invaders. The Security Council and the General Assembly have both overwhelmingly agreed on the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect, which obligates states to intervene to stop crimes against humanity. But no head of state should be left wondering whether they might be able to get away with annexing major parts of another state without being met by the same compensatory claims. And no state should ever feel free to invade another without at least cobbling together serious multilateral support for it.
Subjecting Putin to these reparations would meet the anarchy of war with the order of international law. It would meet Russia’s attempt to overturn the world order with its continued development. And it would meet Russia’s criminality with precise legal mechanisms providing just compensation. The fact that the reserves are freely available would only facilitate the orderliness of the mechanism, which would symbolize the order of lawfulness over the disorder of war. If the reserves proved inadequate to meet the expenses of the invasion, the commission could explore payouts from the frozen assets of Russian oligarchs, who have benefitted from their support for the regime. And the rest might be converted into Russia’s outstanding debt, which failing payment would impact their credit ratings.
Nato military missions have always been followed up by prolonged statebuilding and substantial development aid, which has become the order of the day following major outbreaks of violence in the twenty-first century. The United States spent trillions of dollars on statebuilding and development aid following its illegal invasion of Iraq and about a trillion dollars in its attempt to build a secure state in Afghanistan, which involved endless disbursements of aid. In short, the United States integrated a mechanism much like this into its own war efforts, however imperfect and self interested they may have been. So, we should expect nothing less of its critics in Russia. Meanwhile, more elegant statebuilding and development missions have been carried out by the United Nations following its peacekeeping missions in what now amounts to dozens of states across the world.
Ideally, the commission would be used to create a model to be applied to would be invaders in the future.
In short, aggressor nations and the international community now pay a substantial price waging war, and there is no reason that Russia should continue to be the exception. If Putin is unwilling to provide this compensation himself, as he has failed to do in Syria and the Donbass, the international community should not hesitate to take his frozen assets and put them to good use. If that means Putin is going to lash out at the international community, then it would only be cause for Russia’s further isolation and the prosecution of its military officers and officials.
No doubt, this will remind many of the Versailles Treaty which, following the First World War, sought to punish Germany for starting the war, thereby setting the stage for the Second. Yet, Germany was not solely responsible for the war. It was not responsible for prolonging it, nor its worst crimes. In this way, it was an unjust settlement imposed by the victors simply because they were able to, thereby making it a poor analogy to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Ukraine did nothing to provoke, and a poor analogy to the commission, which would be broadly international in scope. Yet, the settlement also sought to carve up Germany, which was a nation still in formation, and that added stupidity to injustice, as it helped Hitler justify the expansion of Germany.
International institutions were not nearly so developed at the time, nor was the alliance of democratic states, which might have held Germany to the settlement. And the sense of justice in international law, along with our ideas of human rights, remained far weaker and in embryo. So, the only thing holding the treaty together was the power and unity of its victors, who lacked both a serious enforcement mechanism and stable liberal international institutions through which to act. But perhaps the biggest difference is that the international community of nations did not have Germany’s cash in hand.
In this sense, the ultimate bargaining chip with Russia may be the bargaining chips themselves.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Fascism This Time: And the Global Future of Democracy