It’s hard to imagine Vladimir Putin kneeling before Western powers and demanding an end to economic sanctions against Russia in exchange for a definitive ceasefire in Ukraine. This is not the style of the character, who by the way did not back down in 2014, when similar sanctions tried to dissuade him from annexing the Crimean Ukrainian peninsula.
If so, what good are sanctions? It’s a good question, recently posed to three guest experts in London for a podcast miniseries by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, better known as Chatham House.
It is not such a revered institution around here, but for the record, in 2017 the University of Pennsylvania (USA) placed it in second place in the world for academic credibility, behind the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.
But back to sanctions. What do Chatham House scholars say in “War in Ukraine: Can the sanctions make a difference?” (Ukraine war: can sanctions make a difference?) is that they prevent Russia from having the money to carry out all the warlike evils that Putin has in his head. But it is not for lack of resources that he will, to a lesser extent, stop committing these evils.
Punishments allow for other reflections. Those who impose them consider themselves childishly powerful, as did the American Joe Biden when he said that Russia would not receive another dollar, one more yen or one more euro. Whale.
It’s not that simple. The podcast interviews an upscale Russian consumer, who says he finds the same goods today as he did in times of plenty, but at a much higher price and less often. “It’s not devastating, but people are nervous and hopeless,” says the anonymous character.
Economist Creon Butler, one of the debaters, most dramatically exemplifies this reasoning. Due to the embargo, this year’s GDP will decrease by 10% to 15%. The sanctions block commercial transactions, freeze reserves at the Central Bank and encourage military support for Ukraine. With them, in the long term there will be small exceptions such as India, which normally trades with Russia to compensate for its arms imports.
The American Christine McDaniel, a senior researcher at the Mercatus Center, says that sanctions, to be effective, need to modify the behavior of the State that suffers them. Now, this has not happened with any major country in the last half century. Iran, despite them, has not given up on its nuclear program. South Africa continued with apartheid despite being internationally punished for segregating the black population. The model may eventually work in small and less powerful countries, which is not the case in Russia.
A third and final debater, Russian policy expert Bill Browder, says the ideal would be for Western sanctions to break Putin’s military backbone, causing him to surrender to the Ukrainians. But this scenario is fanciful.
The Kremlin cannot today count on US$ 24 billion in foreign exchange reserves, because 69% of that amount has been frozen. The war is costing Russia up to $1 billion a day, according to some projections, and there is nothing to indicate that this cost will fall.
Browder also says that so far Moscow has not been taken seriously in trying to respond to sanctions with the threat of using nuclear weapons. It is very demoralizing, although the country still has gold reserves and maintains its former level of trade with China.
The curious thing is that none of the debaters discussed the relevant ideological effects for governments that adopt sanctions. They must believe that they are destroying the economy of the belligerent country, when in fact, instead of a fatal bloodletting, they are causing something only deeper than scratches.
It is true that such a line of reasoning would be politically incorrect and would take away from the West a cause — the moral and unconditional defense of Ukraine — that it has not found in its rhetorical arsenal since the good times of the Cold War.
There remains then the crowd for effects that are difficult to happen. May the sanctions break with all imaginable gravity any plans for prosperity that may have existed in Russia. Let the oligarchs ask for the potty in the face of widespread bankruptcy. And let Putin be deposed and exiled to Siberia.
But while none of that happens, reflections like those stimulated by Chatham House are the most realistic and thought-provoking.
