Almost nothing is as we imagined, the sanctions not only do not work, but are downright counterproductive. The picture is quite scary.
"A series of sanctions have even improved Russia's warfare capabilities," is the title of Die Welt's interview with Andrei Movchan, who lives in London. The Russian star economist points out:
now "virtually everyone" admits that the sanctions were introduced without clarifying the purpose;
moreover, half of the sanctions directly benefit the Kremlin, while they are bad for the rest of the world.
According to him, in terms of the confrontation with NATO, Russia is really weakened by the fact that it is much more difficult to get access to advanced technologies -
however, since the war against Ukraine is being carried out largely using the methods of the Second World War, sanctions cannot prevent it.
Moreover, the sanctions preventing capital transfers abroad even help: while a continuous outflow of capital could have crashed the system, now the money forced to stay in the country is flowing into the arms industry - according to Movcsan's estimate
With this, Russia gets about 100 billion dollars in additional resources every year.
Meanwhile, the sanctions are not inherently comprehensive, as China, India and the Middle East continue to cooperate with Russia; thus, although direct foreign investments and revenues from oil exports decreased,
this will not end the war and will not bring down Putin.
The economist believes that, with the large number of sanctions, the authorities "mainly wanted to present a certain moral image to voters who are not familiar with such topics anyway.
They wanted to demonstrate how to separate Good and Evil from each other, by punishing Evil."
which does not change at all, but "the point is that the picture is beautiful". While it was "completely absurd" to think that Russians would revolt just because there was no more McDonald's or they couldn't vacation in the West.
Moreover, by building an iron curtain and stigmatizing all Russians as undesirables, the West discourages possible alternative forces and
it just reinforces the Kremlin's narrative regarding the unfriendly West;
according to the economist, therefore, if Russia faced a crossroads today, it would probably not choose the western direction. The population is already used to poverty and authoritarian leadership, so if appropriate, a regime "much worse than the current one" could come, since "there is lower".
If it were up to Movchan, he would immediately stop the sanctions that prevent the outflow of money from Russia,
and would retain those that limit access to modern technology and foreign exchange; the latter would be solved with the help of a globally applicable tariff instead of the price cap, and the income thus received would be used to support Ukraine. At the same time, with regard to technology imports, he said:
the Russian elite in this field is actually increasingly renouncing the West and orienting itself towards China,
because from there you can access various technologies even without political change.
(Below the original article, a commenter added to the sanctioning facts that his "Russian Blue" cat was excluded from several cat shows due to its Russian origin.)
Featured image: Natalia Kolesnikova/POOL/AFP
