Strangling Russia’s Economy Won’t End Putin’s War — But Could Be Disastrous for Civilians
The latest Western sanctions mean “total economic and financial war on Russia,” according to a European finance minister. There’s little reason to hope this will stop Putin’s war — but it will bring a longer-term attrition that mainly hurts ordinary Russians.
The long-professed concerns with Vladimir Putin’s human rights abuses against the Russian people are at odds with the sudden nonchalance with which potentially enormous costs are now being imposed on those same people. (Www.kremlin.ru / Wikimedia Commons)
In the days since Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, members of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have responded with an array of financial sanctions without meaningful historical precedent.
These events have been unfolding at a dizzying pace: over a mere five days, the response has evolved from aggressive yet targeted sanctions against key individuals and businesses to outright financial warfare that is likely to push Russia into a currency crisis. Already on Monday, the ruble had dropped almost 30 percent relative to the US dollar.
The speed of this escalation isn’t the only remarkable thing — it also saw an unusually unified response of the EU and the United States, with the former arguably outdoing the latter in its willingness to punish Russia for Vladimir Putin’s crimes. “We are going to wage a total economic and financial war on Russia,” Emmanuel Macron’s finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, announced on French television, adding, for good measure, “We are going to cause the collapse of the Russian economy.”
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