Two years after the full-scale invasion, Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe and Robert Zoellick argue that the U.S. and Europe should transfer $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to Ukraine
As Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russia’s full-scale invasion become increasingly hobbled by a lack of money and material, and congressional debates about providing more aid fall prey to partisan bickering, support is growing in Washington, D.C. and European capitals for a new way to fund the war. And it is being led by two Harvard Law School alumni: Laurence Tribe ’66, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Emeritus, and Robert Zoellick ’81, the former head of the World Bank.
In meetings with Biden administration officials and foreign ministers across Europe, and in a series of legal memos and newspaper opinion pieces, Tribe, Zoellick, and other advocates outline the legal and moral merits of forcing one nation to bankroll the lion’s share of Ukraine’s military and reconstruction costs: Russia.
As men and military machines rolled across Ukraine’s borders on February 24, 2022, Treasury officials in Washington and abroad quickly began freezing approximately $300 billion in Russian state assets held abroad in a variety of currencies. Since then, governments and taxpayers have shelled out billions in support, while Russia’s frozen funds have remained safely locked up in bank vaults, generating interest.
According to a nearly 200-page legal analysis co-authored by Tribe for the Renew Democracy Initiative in September 2023, “freezing Russia’s assets is not enough. The United States and its allies can and must do more. Any country that currently holds Russian assets should transfer them to Ukraine.” The memo’s co-authors are Raymond P. Tolentino, Kate M. Harris, Jackson Erpenbach, and Jeremy Lewin ’22.
He and Zoellick contend that international law authorizes governments to transfer those funds to the harmed party as a proportional countermeasure against the invader. Moreover, they argue that a U.S. law — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA — authorizes the Biden administration to transfer Russian state assets to Ukraine even without action by Congress or a court order.
The two hasten to note that this approach is different from sanctions and only targets Russia’s sovereign assets, rather than personal property such as individual bank accounts or luxury yachts. Instead, they believe it is a legitimate response under international law to a grave violation of another country’s sovereign rights by a malevolent state actor.
Tribe and Zoellick’s efforts to support Ukraine are a long time in the making. “Shortly after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, almost two years ago, I started to think that this was likely to end up as a war of attrition, and a stalemate,” says Zoellick, who also served as U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush and undersecretary of state and White House deputy chief of staff under George H.W. Bush. “And in wars of attrition, economics are just as important as military supplies. And that seems to be what we’re seeing.”
