U.S. sanctions on Russian sovereign wealth fund face reversal as financial warfare meets multipolar reality
Original framing: “The U.S. called it Putin’s ‘slush fund.’ Now Trump may drop sanctions on it.” — The Japan Times
The trickster Hermes — patron of thieves, merchants, and border-crossers — presides over this story. The U.S. Treasury designates RDIF a 'slush fund' while its own Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) 2021 leak revealed U.S. banks (JPMorgan, BNY Mellon) processed $2T in suspicious Russian flows — the 'Laundromat' the sanctions architects enabled. Erasmus's 'Praise of Folly' fits: the sanctioners sanction themselves via the revolving door (e.g., Sigal Mandelker, ex-Treasury, now at Skadden advising sanctioned clients). Anansi the spider would note the irony: the 'rules-based order' creates exceptions (OFAC General License 8A for Russian fertilizer, GL-12 for energy payments) that make sanctions a Swiss cheese — holes where power flows. The trickster does not mock; it names the absurdity that solemnity conceals: 'slush fund' is the name the hegemon gives to its own shadow.
The 'slush fund' narrative is a trickster's mirror: it reflects the U.S.
financial system's own opacity (FinCEN Files, Delaware LLCs, Freeport art storage) onto a Russian vehicle that structurally resembles the sovereign wealth funds of Norway, Singapore, and the Gulf. Sanctions on RDIF have accelerated the very military-industrial upgrading they aimed to prevent (Dreger et al. 2023), while the Global South — led by Indonesia, India, Brazil — has refused complicity, building alternative settlement rails (BRICS Pay) that make dollar coercion a wasting asset. The real story is not Trump vs. Putin but the fracture of a unipolar financial order that never reckoned with its own offshore architecture. Indigenous communities in Yamal, migrant workers in Moscow, and Ukrainian economists in Kyiv all name the same structure: a state-capitalist extractive machine that the 'slush fund' epithet both reveals and conceals. Systemic solutions require not more designations but a multilateral transparency regime (UNCTAD/EITI model), Indigenous veto power over extractive finance, sanctions sunset clauses tied to Bretton Woods reform, and worker-owned conversion of the military-industrial base — turning the trickster's irony into institutional redesign.