Oligarch sanctions were essentially a good idea but they won't sway Putin — and the aftermath is uncertain, says expert

Oligarch sanctions are a good idea, but authorities didn't think through what might happen next.

T om Keatinge, the director of financial crimes and security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, discussed the situation in an interview with Channel 4 News.

Keatinge said that sanctions put the whole issue of sanctions in the public eye.

He said it was helpful from a PR perspective, but it doesn't seem to me that this is going to change Putin.

He said that he didn't believe that the sanctions affected Putin.

According to reports, the US kept Roman Abramovich off of its sanctions list after Ukraine asked for him to be kept off it. He is said to have acted as a peace envoy between Russia and Ukraine.

Two of the four boats owned byAbramovich are in Antigua. Keatinge told Channel 4 News that the question at hand was whether Antigua would follow western countries sanctions.

Keatinge said that it was easy to sanction individuals, but what happens after that is very complicated.

The difficulty in finding the true owners of superyachts was previously reported by Insider. There are also fears that the vessels could quickly waste away.

Keatinge said in the interview that it was difficult to know what the individuals owned because they had been preparing for months.

Keatinge said that they have been freezing the assets, not seizing them. We are not a dictatorship in the UK and we cannot expropriate them.

We have to make sure that we differentiate between taking the asset from people because they are the proceeds of crime and freezing them because we are at a financial war with Russia.