The oligarch Oleg Deripaska He stressed that Russia had withstood Western sanctions imposed on it over its invasion of Ukraine, and warned that Western hopes that it would use such a 19th-century tool to end the war or bring about regime change they are doomed to fail.

President Vladimir Putin is preparing the Russian economy of 2.1 trillion. dollars for a long war in Ukraine and has repeatedly provoked the West by saying it has failed to hit Russia, which is forecast to grow 2.8 percent this year and 2.3 percent next year.

Western hopes that it would trigger a quick economic crisis in Russia proved wrong: the world’s second largest oil exporter it has no problem selling its oil on world markets while trade is booming with China — and with some other countries.

“I was surprised that private companies were so flexible. I was more or less certain that up to 30 percent of the economy would collapse, but it was much less,” the 55-year-old tycoon told the Financial Times (FT).

Deripaska said Russia’s vast wealth of natural resources made it very attractive to many — including China and other countries — to never leave herand how the West hopes to use sanctions to change Russia’s leaders they are doomed.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, Deripaska himself has been under sanctions from Britain over his alleged ties to Putin. Legal action has been launched against the sanctions.

“Believing that the sanctions will stop [τον πόλεμο] or they will cause regime change or bring us somehow closer to the end of the conflict…. No. We need another solution,” he clarified to the FT.

Deripaska, who studied physics at Moscow University, got into metals trading when the Soviet Union collapsed and made his fortune buying stakes in aluminum factories.

He founded RUSAL, which merged the jewels of the Soviet aluminum industry into a holding company, in 2000. According to this year’s Russian edition of Forbes, he is the 54th richest man in Russia with a fortune worth $2.5 billion.

Deripaska still owns a part of Rusal through his stake in parent company En+ Group.

He said he doubted whether sanctions, which he described as a 19th-century tool, they will work as a miracle weapon in a global world.

“I always had my doubts about this Wunderwaffe, as the Germans used to say, of sanctions that weaponize the financial system as a kind of tool for negotiation,” Deripaska said.

“Yes, there’s war spending and all these subsidies and government support but it’s still a hopelessly low slowdown... The private economy has found a way to operate and to do so successfully.”

The United States in 2018 imposed sanctions on Deripaska and other influential Russians for what it said were profits from a Russian state engaged in “vicious activities” around the world.

The sanctions, an attempt to punish Moscow for alleged meddling in the 2016 US election, were “baseless, ridiculous and absurd”, Deripaska said at the time.