Still 980 away from a thousand cuts

Donald Trump has finally decided to hit Russia with sanctions - the first package he has imposed since he came back to the White House in January.

- By SERGEY V POPOV

The sanctions target Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two largest oil companies, as a retaliation for Vladimir Putin’s refusal to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine. The announcement came in the wake of the decision to call off a planned summit between the two leaders in Budapest next month.

The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said in a statement: “We encourage our allies to join us in and adhere to these sanctions.” In fact, the EU has imposed 19 rounds of sanctions against Russia since the full-scale invasion in 2022. The UK government has passed sanctions which it estimates have cost Russia more than £28 billion since the start of the war. And the Biden administration also repeatedly imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion.

In March 2022, I wrote a piece for The Conversation explaining why I thought the sanctions imposed on Russia in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine wouldn’t topple Putin. Sanctions often fail to achieve their goals — the Russian economy has specifically been set up to resist western sanctions. Three years on, Russia’s land grab continues to ravage Ukraine, albeit clearly with much less success than expected by Russia’s generals. A lot of this resistance is due to Ukrainian military heroism and creativity, and a lot of it due to humanitarian and military assistance from EU, the US and other allies. But how much of it was due to sanctions is open to debate.