Sanctions On Russia Still Aren’t Working

We’re just over a year into the Russia-Ukraine war, and yet the much-touted economic sanctions from the west seem to have had little effect on persuading the the Kremlin to back off. If anything the reverse is true.

That’s a shame because so far up to 300,000 people have died in the conflict, according to some estimates. And the sanctions have done nothing to help.

Last week I was invited to talk about the sanctions question on NPR radio’s Detroit station based on a story I had written for Time magazine just as the hostilities kicked off last year.

Sadly, the piece, titled Why Sanctions on Russia Won’t Work, has stood the test of time. It would have been better for everyone if the sanctions had worked and the war was over.

Still, it didn’t play out like that. What happened is what almost always happens with sanctions.

Let me quickly go over the main points from the WDET broadcast.

On the show a proponent of sanctions said these economic edicts were working because the Russian economy was crumbling. This is true the Russian economy is shrinking, down by 3.7% in the latest quarter compared to gains of 3.5% in the first quarter of 2022, according to TradingEconomics.

However, as far as I can see the goal of the sanctions was not to crush the Russian economy. Rather it was to change the minds of the people in the Kremlin, including Vladimir Putin, and get the Russian army to back off. In that sense, it has failed. Putin has done nothing to pull back. Instead, he’s responded to his army’s fruitless efforts by conscripting more soldiers and throwing them at Ukraine.

This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. As my sources argued in the Time piece, the problem when a country gets sanctioned is that the population tends to rally around the metaphorical flag. It this case that’s meant overwhelming support for the Kremlin. Last month over 80% of the population showed support for Putin, according to data from Statista. That’s higher than it was in September.

The sanctions also haven’t stopped Russia selling oil, one of its key exports. Crude oil production is slightly lower than before the invasion, but still remains above 10 million barrels a day.

You can bet if the country is drilling or pumping oil, then the black gold is going to other nations such as China. It’s also hard to see how Russia’s paltry economy could consume 10 million barrels a day for itself.

History should also tell us that sanctions don’t work. Cuba hasn’t behaved any better despite decades of U.S. sanctions.

Neither has Iran’s theocratic regime, sanctioned from the begining of the regime — in fact, the Islamic Republic has actively sent its expeditionary Quds force, part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, into other countries to cause mischief across the globe including Syria, Iraq and other places, according to news reports.

Is there anything good about the sanctions on Russia? Perhaps.

In the broadest sense sanctions are a way for leading politicians to virtue signal to their domestic populations. If put simply it would be something along the lines of the following: ‘I’m appalled at the misery Russia has caused so I’m going tp penalize them.’

If the goal is that simple, then it has worked. But it has done little to persuade the Kremlin to stop its unprovoked and unnecessary war.