Longer term? Maybe. Enough pressure on those in power will erode Putin’ support base. Cut off enough of his wealth and he’ll have a harder time holding on to power.
Oh no, he could crush Ukraine for now but that does not guarantee a definitive victory. But think about the hate Ukrainians have for Russian oppression, they’d stay quiet for a while if needed (for lack of viable options) but at the next chance they’d stab their captor in their back in a moment of weakness. Brothers they will never be by force.
As someone who's been tracking Russian politics due to being born there some time ago, the recent wave of sanctions are starting to have a rather undesired effect.
Roughly since 2008 (Georgian war), Russia has been actively cutting many economic ties that could have been used as a point of leverage. They have a knock-off debit card system [0], dedicated Internet censorship agency [1], and have been expelling Western civic organizations and trying to ban various European goods (e.g. french cheese).
This absolutely does reduce the life quality of an average Russian, but it is done in a slow controlled way, and spun the right way with massive propaganda, so people don't call out bullshit. And the West has less and less leverage over Russia with each step like this.
There is an unexploited Achilles heel though - Russian elites commonly send their spouses and children to live in the West, because it provides a safe haven against the internal Russian power struggle. Forcing those to return back to Russia would very quickly change incentives on many levels, but I cannot envision the West doing it. Not when it has become the safe harbor for dirty money made in poorer countries. Otherwise a random bullshit job in the First World wouldn't pay >100x the rate of the guy how assembles iPhones somewhere in the "growing economies".
The West is weak. It is used to solving problems on paper (2008 crisis, Pandemic-time money printing) and hoping that it will somehow pan out. The tolerance for getting out of your comfort zone is near zero. The politicians will toss out a few strong-worded U.N. resolutions and will hope that Putin gets bored, or their term expires before it gets any worse.
Except, it only works, as long as less spoiled people in less fortunate places are willing to assemble your smartphones, sew your jeans and operate the oil rigs for fraction of your wage. And these people will have much more willpower and commitment, and they may eventually realize that conquering the West could be more fun than serving it.
Not that I like it, just abstract detached thoughts.
This is why I'm skeptical of claims that Putin won't get what he wants here. The West is politically incapable of rallying people to do the right thing if it comes at any degradation to their livelihoods. US/EU banks still want their bonds paid and US oil companies don't want Russia seizing their investments. The incumbent party, especially in an election year, doesn't want any more economic risk, and the donor class won't stand for any losses.
Well, it's deeper than it seems. You cannot just start revoking random people's citizenship for being relatives of the loosely defined bad guys. That's the straight route to turning your own country into a 3rd-world dictatorship.
What you can do is tighten the anti-money-laundring laws, so that living in the West off money made in sketchy ways becomes harder, but there's a major conflict of interest here. A lot of the West's wealth is fueled by the dirty money flows from elsewhere, and cutting it off without inevitable side effects (e.g. real estate crash) is not an easy task.
I don't think anyone who actually thinks past headlines doesn't realize that this will hurt the Russian populace more than it will Putin, but they're really one of the pressure points to getting him to stop his war crimes against Ukraine. I think it's a multifront effort without actually firing bullets and the best tool that we have.
How about Gerhard Schröder? I'm not very up to date about his role at the boards of Rosneft and Gazprom, but I'm pretty sure he must have had an influence somewhere in the current situation (although indirectly, and he probably was played)
What surprised me the most was that Biden's response was basically that he'd talk about it in the morning with world leaders [1] and not something like let's enact tonight plans we made during the time we were warning that this was going to happen.
The disinvestment campaign did very little except transfer ownership of some of the largest companies in the country to South Africans and I would assume the bulk of that would have ended up in the hands of the politically connected.
Sanctions also didn't do much. There was a thriving market for goods from overseas. Even now more than 30 years later there's a tradition of giving your relatives a list of things to buy when they travel internationally. Sanctions probably indirectly hurt poor South Africans but never anyone politically connected.
Whether they “work” depends on the goal I suppose.
If the goal is to get misbehaving countries or leaders to change their behavior, I’m not aware of any examples, not matter how far back we look in history, where they worked. Plenty of examples where sanctions are imposed and the behavior gets worse.
If the goal is to weaken a country (which could be a good thing, if that country is belligerent), I think there are plenty examples of that working. It can have the unfortunate side effect of also impoverishing the ordinary citizens of the sanctioned nation.
> It is extremely rare for the U.S. to sanction a sitting world leader, and the Kremlin had previously said it would consider sanctions on Putin himself to be a de facto severing of relations between the U.S. and Russia.
Seems like it sends a message that we have a problem with these particular guys, and we'd prefer to be talking to people representing Russia who aren't these particularly guys, however that might happen.
Wealthier than the Queen of England? Wealthier than the Saudi Royal Family?
Wealth stops making sense for heads of state because it's wrapped up in politics and tradition. Vladimir can't come to Austin Texas on a whim and buy himself a mess of grouper and bourbon. I can. I'm here now. I traveled here from Toronto on a whim. Is he is wealthier than I am?
The answer is still obviously yes, but it starts to get fuzzy vs people like Elon Musk who have functionally more freedom and massive amounts of assets.
You're basically making my point for me. The Queen of England is the theoretical owner of most of the land in all of Canada. Take a look at this map of Ontario, for example:
It doesn't make sense to compare or consider heads of states' wealth. They can't spend like a true billionaire and they have powers that billionaires do not. They can order the death of almost any human being on earth without worrying about security.
It makes more sense to talk of power differentials between heads of state and heads of government than it does mere cash.
> The Queen of England is the theoretical owner of most of the land in all of Canada.
No, the Queen of Canada is. Given the nature of the respective constitutional monarchies, the distinction is significant, even though those crowns are held by the same natural person.
> It doesn't make sense to compare or consider heads of states' wealth.
It doesn't make sense to treat the wealth held by a constitutional monarchy the same as personal wealth of the monarch, but with either absolute monarchies or heads of state who don't have any abstract claim on the wealth of the nation or state as such, those issues don't arise, and even with Constitutional monarchs the personal wealth of the monarch as distinct from that controlled by the State in the name of the monarch can be discussed with little problem.
The gross of that wealth is probably not going to be inheritable to Putin’s family, though I doubt his family aren’t set up for generations. The wealth Putin ammassed is based on confiscation from other oligarchs who made their wealth in turn by embezelment from the public wealth of the former USSR and actual embezzlement done by the little Napoleon of Russia himself (yes, I mean Putin and yes I’m hinting at a certain complex).
You think like a normal person. I for example can not fathom how anyone can want to be a politician. Yet people do and they have their own kicks out of it. So I do not think Putin is jealous of Musk. As for your grouper - they have enough exotic places and exotic food in Russia as long as you have money to pay.
Well, for one Queen of England(queen of a lot of other nations as well) doesn't have any power like say what Saudi King or Putin has. She is a mere ceremonial head.
Also, from what I have read, the estimates of her wealth doesn't even make her a billionaire.
I think she is worth about £350 million private wealth but the British Monarchy as an entity is worth about £70billion so a lot more than Putin's reported £18billion.
The Queen is reportedly also able to spend 15% of the Crown Estate which holds about about £10billion in land assets.
Prince Philip was paid half a million a year by Govt and the Queen is paid £65million a year.
On the point of power, she is the law in the UK, as head of state she is the top, so whilst she has never exercised her powers to cancel Govt, she has the legal authority to do this.
She also receives weekly updates from not only the Prime Minister, but she also gets weekly updates from the heads of the arm forces, security services and other heads of public entities. So when considering her Royal Advisors, these are perhaps best seen as a form of long running Shadow Govt not to be confused with the Govt opposition parties, so she can influence govt overtly and covertly, in much the same way as a teacher might make a passing remark to a pupil, or another person in a position of authority making a comment to an inferior. Its subtle but right there on display, with nothing to hide because people dont recognise the psychological Obedience to Authority.
> so whilst she has never exercised her powers to cancel Govt, she has the legal authority to do this.
Yeah, my point was more on the lines of, she doesn't use that power, making her a ceremonial head unlike the other two. I think this is one of those things, where if she does exercise her power even for cancelling a resolution passed by the commons, it would immediately lead to public outcry. It might even mean eventually throwing away the monarchy.
Even for something major as Brexit, we don't know what she thought of it, there was an outfit she wore that was speculated to show her support of the EU, but I remember that was it.
> British Monarchy as an entity is worth about £70billion
Does this come from the assets they hold? As far as I remember, they don't own some of those outright. They get a share of the revenue those things make.
No, the Monarchy does use its power. It has in Canada multiple times.
Anyway, not going to keep debating this. Wealth is something that can be reasoned about when an individual doesn't have serious security concerns and when an individual doesn't have meaningful coercive power through use of force.
But a billionaire in a new communist state isn't really a billionaire any more than a despotic dictator is since they can't really retain the wealth absent ongoing action and so much of the assets under their command belong to the state.
I'll put it another way, if Russia has a democratic uprising like Ukraine did, who will own Putin's giant mansion. It's obviously not Putin.
Real billionaires can move the vast majority of their assets out of a country without anyone seriously putting up a fight.
I don't have a subscription unfortunately so I can't read the full article, but even if US sanctions don't do much, there are tons of other countries sanctioning them now.
> Why then are the people around Putin not scared about possible fallout from a new round of far-reaching economic sanctions? In their eyes, the sanctions that the West imposed to punish Russia for the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas were intended largely to check Russia’s rise. America and its allies would have found a way to introduce them one way or another, they were just looking for an excuse.
> Since 2014 such views have solidified. Messrs Patrushev, Bortnikov and Naryshkin all find themselves on the US Treasury’s blacklist already, along with many other members of Mr Putin’s inner circle. There is no way back for them to the West’s creature comforts. They are destined to end their lives in Fortress Russia, with their assets and their relatives alongside them.
Many of them have kids and other relatives in the West, living off their money. Releasing the information who they are and cutting them off can be the next step.
I think they do plenty. They're not going to make Putin order his troops to surrender. Nothing could do that. It will cause them irritation at the very least and hopefully diminish their capacity to cause trouble at least a bit. If they go buy 20 new tanks instead of 24 it did something even if it feels like nothing changed
Yes but if the whole country goes through enough unnecesary hardship (Russians have a tough life) and his manupulative PR apparatus stops functioning he could start fearing for his life. Any of his thugs he’s surrounded by could at some point initiate a mutiny and eventually after failed attempts it could end his reign. Putin is bluffing big time too, he knows it. At the same time he achieved so much power and wealth that he may want to go for a different glory, he seems to want to revive a broken empire, broken in the sense that at some point Russia was looked up and now he’d need to coerce friends into an involuntary hug. Russia is so broken (not defending US, which is on the verge of catastastrophe too) that nobody wants to be their friend beside getting cheap gas. Cheap gas has been one thing to keep Russia from collapsing altogether though, it’s a bargaining chip but not really the best hand in the game
It's unknown how rich Vladimir Putin is exactly. It's suspected he may be the richest person on Earth with a net worth in excess of $200 billion however.
Sanctions against Russia are completely ineffective because the US and the EU are unwilling to include things that would actually hurt Russia, namely access to the financial system (ie SWIFT), energy exports (because Germany in particular is dependent on Russian natural gas, the assets held by Russian kleptocrats).
On the security front, the EU woulld never accept Ukraine as a NATO member and the US won't put troops in Ukraine because that would put nuclear powers in direct conflict.
So given no effective sanction options and no military options, the US and the EU should've realized the only way to defuse this situation was to negotiate. Yet Biden categorically ruled out the possibility of formally refusing to admit Ukraine to NATO, something that was never going to happen anyway.
This situation bears some similarity to the US and Japan pre-WW2 actually. The US moved to block Japanese access to oil. That made war all but inevitable. I'm not saying the US was wrong there but it's just a consequence of that policy. LIkewise, leaving the door open to an anti-Russian military alliance expanding to the borders of Russia put Putin in a corner. Putin is still in the wrong here, straight up. But the options are to deescalate or World War Three. Given the invasion it's not much harder to negotiate out of this but what other option is there?
One thing I will say is that on the issue of seizing assets of Russian kleptocrats, real estate has long been a way of hiding money in developed countries. London real estate in particular is awash with Russian money. Maybe it's time we end anonymous ownership of property.
> So given no effective sanction options and no military options, the US and the EU should've realized the only way to defuse this situation was to negotiate. Yet Biden categorically ruled out the possibility of formally refusing to admit Ukraine to NATO, something that was never going to happen anyway.
You undermine your own argument. Ukraine's admission was never going to happen anyway, and everyone knows it. Putin also knows it. So that isn't why he is invading.
Arguments about NATO membership or repressed Russian speaking minorities and anything else (you get different justifications for the war depending on where you are in the world...) are fig leafs to exploit people's existing opinions of particular parties (in your case, about the US throwing its weight around).
The reality is far simpler: Putin wants the Ukraine personally. His own private reasons are irrelevant. He wants it. And he has the will and capability to take it. And so he is doing so.
I'm going to pick one one part of your statement in particular:
> US and the EU should've realized the only way to defuse this situation was to negotiate
Putin wants Ukraine. Negotiation of any kind was never going to prevent this invasion, unless the concession surrendering without a fight and having Putin install a government of its choice.
> The reality is far simpler: Putin wants the Ukraine personally. His own private reasons are irrelevant. He wants it. And he has the will and capability to take it. And so he is doing so.
This situation is anything but simple.
Example 1: Russia invading Ukraine is powerful evidence to any other country that they need to join NATO for protection, most notably Finland and Sweden.
This is somewhat similar to one of the many problems with the US invading Iraq. It told the rest of the world that the only way to gurantee their safety was to have nuclear weapons. Putin's move drives neutral parties to NATO.
Example 2: while the EU in particular is unwilling to hit Russian energy exports, that situation may change with prolonged Russian aggression.
Example 3: the Russian invasion of Ukraine is deeply unpopular in Russia. Thousands of Russian protestors have been arrested already.
Example 4: Ukraine is a country of ~44M people. Russia cannot possibly hope to hold it. The insurgency cost will be enormous. Attempting to hold Afghanistan in the 1980s had a massive cost for the USSR and was arguably a contributing factor in the USSR's downfall (along with many other factors to be fair). Even if Russia simply plans to install a pro-Russian regime, that's not that dissimilar to what happened in Afghanistan. Occupying Ukraine would probably take hundreds of thousands of troops on an indefinite basis and have a massive cost in resources and lives.
> Putin wants Ukraine. Negotiation of any kind was never going to prevent this invasion,
That's basically the "trying is the first step to failing" School of Diplomacy. There are two broad possiblities: either it could defuse the situation or it couldn't. If it doesn't, then there's no downside to trying. In fact you get to occupy the moral high ground of at least trying.
> US won't put troops in Ukraine because that would put nuclear powers in direct conflict.
That's the reason it won't put troops in now (and the reason anyone asking for that now is insane), but that wasn't the reason it couldn't put troops in 4 months ago.
Note that Russia is about to border NATO across its entire eastern border. This puts two nuclear powers directly staring eachother down at a border.
If Russia grows truculent over, say, Estonia, it's unlikely that the US response will be withdrawing troops from it.
