Sanctions against Russia haven’t failed

One of Russia’s toxic TV presenters recently cackled that Western sanctions ‘have only helped Russia wean itself off dependence on foreign imports and given a boost to our own producers’. At a time when Russia’s third quarter growth has actually exceeded expectations, hitting 5.5 per cent, it is worth noting what sanctions can and cannot do. The bottom line is that sanctions have not failed – but were never going to be the silver bullet solution to Kremlin aggression some claimed at the start.

As in so many aspects of the West’s response to the 2022 Ukraine invasion, unrealistic early boosterism has led to subsequent, and arguably equally unrealistic, despondency. Daleep Singh, US deputy national security adviser for international economics, had claimed that the Russian economy would quickly be in ‘freefall’. Certainly there was a serious initial impact: Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov recently admitted that ‘there was a threat of a collapse, we really had to mobilise all resources and internal forces in order to prevent this collapse’.