President Joe Biden and other elected officials hope to seize assets, including highly valuable U.S. real estate, owned by Russian oligarchs in the wake of Moscow waging war in Ukraine. The properties span the nation, from high-rises lining New York City’s Central Park to mansions scattered throughout the Midwest, to oceanfront penthouses in Miami Beach and luxury estates in Los Angeles.

“The U.S. Department of Justice is assembling a dedicated task force to go after the crimes of Russian oligarchs,” Biden said in the State of the Union earlier this week. “We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets. We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”

However, it won’t be easy to make good on those promises.

The U.S. real estate market has long been popular with money launderers across the globe. That’s because it’s often near impossible to tie Vladimir Putin‘s cronies, co-conspirators, and benefactors to the U.S. real estate they own, due to complicated trusts, shell or limited liability companies, and other ownership structures that allow them to conceal their identities. In addition, not all of these folks are on the U.S. sanction list. Even if they are, a loophole allows them to transfer their property to family and friends.

A new law passed in 2020 authorized the U.S. Treasury to stop criminals from hiding and laundering their assets such as luxury real estate. The law compels companies to report the true owners, a requirement critics say isn’t always being met.

“There’s this misunderstanding that you can just go out and seize these mansions, seize these yachts. For so many of them, it’s a complete black box,” Casey Michel, author of “American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History,” told NBC News. “The U.S. provided all the tools of anonymity the oligarchs needed.”

Since the end of the Soviet Union, experts say Russian money has been flowing into other parts of the world, including U.S. real estate. Manhattan was popular in the runup to the housing bust in the mid-2000s. Florida has also been another destination of choice for these folks to park their money—along with some unexpected real estate markets like Cleveland.

Wealthy Russians invested nearly $100 million in Trump buildings in southern Florida, according to a 2017 Reuters story. The Reuters investigation looked at at least 63 buyers with Russian passports or addresses who purchased luxury condos in Donald Trump–branded buildings.

An estimated 5,500 ultrawealthy Russians own about $240 billion in real estate around the world, according to David Friedman, who co-founded wealth intelligence company WealthQuotient. This was reported in a recent RealDeal article.

“The real estate of these Russian oligarchs will most likely sell at a significant discount to market value,” says Friedman. He expects the U.S. government will seize what property it can and sell it, likely for less than it’s valued.

“We need to put pressure on Putin and send a message to the world that the behavior we’re seeing in the Ukraine will be punished no matter where people are trying to hide,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine told Fox Business. He estimates these oligarchs have at least a billion dollars of real estate in New York City alone. “We need to go after them so that Putin and his inner circle feel this directly.”

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