Frozen but not recovered: state capacity and the gap between seizing and realising assets in wartime Ukraine

Ukraine’s Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA) is the oversight body for sanctioned assets that have been seized in the war due to alleged criminal links to the Russian regime, its economy or support for its war of aggression in Ukraine. As such, it represents a key civilian institution in the war effort, as it aims to manage sanctioned assets for the benefit of the Ukrainian people and its democratic institutions. This report highlights, however, the problem that ARMA has repeatedly failed to convert these assets into sources of economic revenue for the Ukrainian state. This report is a first cut analysis of some of the challenges that Ukraine faces as it seeks to reform its public institutions – protecting them against capture by private and vested interests – while continuing to prosecute the war of national survival against Russia’s invasion. Resource constraints have meant that we have not been able to combine this analysis of public sources with qualitative interviews, which would have allowed us to develop a fuller and more granular picture. This means that the analysis presented necessarily has a provisional character. The report analyses some of the issues facing Ukraine in the governance field and makes some initial recommendations for how they might be overcome through further public interest reform.