Among all the radical policy shifts carried out during President Trump’s first 100 days, perhaps the most astonishing was his reorientation of America’s posture toward Russia. Support for Ukraine in the ongoing war was long a bipartisan article of faith, but Trump shattered that consensus almost immediately, first by ending the isolation of President Vladimir V. Putin with a direct phone call, and then with high-level talks in Saudi Arabia that cut Kyiv out entirely. The gravity of the change was made clear at the Munich Security Conference, where Vice President JD Vance took the stage to lecture European allies on their suppression of far-right parties — parties that, not coincidentally, have been sympathetic to or even explicitly aligned with Russia. By the time that Trump and Vance had a made-for-TV showdown with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office in late February, it was clear that Russo-American relations had entered a new and cozier era.

Amid the fracas, it would have been easy to miss two lines, buried on the fourth page of a Justice Department memo, circulated two weeks into Trump’s second term: An interagency task force, colorfully named KleptoCapture, would be disbanded. Though KleptoCapture was hardly a household name, its demise was portentous — it indicated the administration’s unwillingness to fight the financial systems that not only allow Kremlin allies to disguise their wealth but also enable international drug cartels to operate with impunity, corrupt officials to launder money from bribes into luxury real estate and the ultrawealthy to avoid paying taxes.

President Joseph R. Biden Jr. himself announced the creation of the force in his 2022 State of the Union address, just one week after Russian tanks started streaming across the border toward Kyiv. For nearly a decade, the United States had been steadily issuing sanctions against a raft of wealthy Russians with close financial and political ties to the Kremlin. Now the task force’s most ambitious goal was to confiscate their wealth, sell their assets and, whenever possible, send the profits to Ukraine. “We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets,” Biden declared, in a line that became something of an informal slogan. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”

Andrew Adams, a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who specialized in money-laundering investigations, was preparing to start a new job in the private sector when he got a call asking him if he wanted to lead the task force. He was given 90 minutes to decide. He said yes. Within 48 hours, Adams left New York for Washington, where he was handed the first of five cellphones, assigned an office and a laptop and introduced to his new colleagues in what he described as a succession of rapid-fire “‘West Wing’-style walk-and-talk” chats as he shuttled from room to room. Soon he was helping draft new laws to expand the government’s power to sell forfeited property and redirect the proceeds to Kyiv.

KleptoCapture’s basic concept was simple enough, but carrying it out would not be so straightforward. Once Adams and his team identified the yachts, luxury apartments and private jets of Russian billionaires, they would have to build cases to seize them. At a minimum, that meant proving who their owners were, which was no easy task. Practically every one of these assets existed in a byzantine realm known as the offshore financial system, where questions as simple as who owns what are obscured within labyrinths of shell companies, anonymous trusts and other legal structures. KleptoCapture was something new and ambitious, a serious effort to break through the offshore system and crack down on some of its most prolific clients.