The businessman behind Swiss authorities’ seizure of 54 paintings from Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum this week has been trying to collect a debt from the Russian government for 14 years, and his “relentless legal assault on Russian assets abroad has previously been denounced… as “financial terrorism’… This is a man, after all, who once filed suit to seize President Vladimir V. Putin’s personal jet. In 2000, he impounded a Russian sailing ship in the French port of Brest, along with its crew, for 11 days. He nearly seized two Russian fighter jets at an air show in Paris a year later.”