The normal justification for sanctioning oligarchs is that doing so will cost them money, causing them to put pressure on Vladimir Putin so he stops killing Ukrainians. But this rests on the untested assumption that they are able to put pressure on him, and that is where the plan is currently falling down. Oligarchs are not what they used to be.
Our idea of the Russian oligarch was born in the 1990s, when a tiny group of men emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet economy, using their nous to seize anything with real value. While the Russian government was left with all the costly bits of the communist state – hospitals, schools, roads and the like – the oligarchs took over all the profitable bits: oilfields, aluminium smelters, anything that could earn dollars on the international markets.
It was like the oligarchs had come from nowhere, but they felt no embarrassment over their rapid rise.
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