Thank you for that question. It's an excellent question.
One of the things I would point out now—and it's very important that everybody understand this—is that the oligarchs don't have political power in Russia. They are subordinate to Vladimir Putin. They're scared of Vladimir Putin. At any point, if they were to criticize him in any way, they could be impoverished, imprisoned or killed. He's done that to other oligarchs to make a point, and everybody is terribly afraid of him.
So the purpose of sanctioning oligarchs is not to get them to rise up and replace him, because that's not going to happen.
We sanction the oligarchs because they are custodians of Vladimir Putin's money. When we sanctioned Vladimir Putin at the very beginning of this process—and I think Canada was either the first or the second country to do that—it was all very satisfying. It was symbolic. But Vladimir Putin doesn't hold money in his own name. He holds the money in the name of other people, these oligarchs. If you look at an oligarch who's worth $20 billion, $10 million belongs to the oligarch and $10 million belongs to Vladimir Putin.
So the purpose of sanctioning the oligarchs is to sanction Vladimir Putin. That's the main purpose. But if we take a step back and we say, “Okay, how is this going to work and what's it going to achieve?” then I think the main objective has to be to cut off his financial ability to fight this war. We have done some good things in terms of doing that. The west and Canada have sanctioned Russia's central bank reserves, which are equal to about $350 billion, which is excellent. The west has sanctioned 35 oligarchs. When I say 35 oligarchs, I mean either the U.S., Canada, the EU, the U.K. or Australia has sanctioned 35 oligarchs. Not necessarily all of them have sanctioned all of those oligarchs. That's also very helpful.
That being said, there are 118 oligarchs on the Forbes' wish list, so we're not there yet. But even with those two categories, which represent a lot of money and a lot of assets all over the world, we've hit only what I would call the savings of Russia. What we haven't hit is the income of Russia. The income of Russia is a billion dollars a day that Russia receives from the sale of oil and gas. Now, most of that goes to Europeans. It goes to Germany and France and Italy and so on. But that's really problematic, because every day Vladimir Putin gets a billion dollars and every day he spends a billion dollars on the war killing Ukrainians. So one could argue that if we don't get that under control then having frozen the assets doesn't mean anything because he continues to have the income to do this.
So that's the major elephant in the room that needs to be dealt with. It's not so much within the capability of Canada, but that's the key to the whole thing. And then the timing very much depends on that. If we were to achieve that, he would quickly run out of money.