Sanctions have now failed to deter not once but twice. Their threats do not discourage Vladimir Putin from invasion Ukraine and their implementation did not prevent Russians in their song.
As a result, the war is widening, unbridled, and Putin is likely to achieve his goals in Ukraine before Russia feels the full economic effects.
The failure of sanctions to stop or contain the war in Ukraine has turned them into something else – an instrument of economic warfare, at least in Putin’s eyes. By treating what Nato and the EU are doing as an act of aggression rather than a financial penalty, he has maintained an escalating dominance.
Russia has aligned what the Western powers want to keep separate. Nato and the EU are prevented from taking other forms of action. The West has greater military capabilities than Russia, but understandably is afraid to resort to it.
Paradoxically, Nato thought it had a good fight. Member states congratulated themselves on how well they had recovered. The increase in German defense spending promises to truly become the country’s latent hegemon over Europe.
Both the union and the EU have been consolidated as multilateral institutions.
So far, however, none of this has helped Ukraine or held Russia back. Nato, as it did in Afghanistan, can sometimes forget that it is a means to an end, not an end.
Mr. Putin may have expected a quick and easy victory, which he has yet to achieve, but that doesn’t mean his strategy has failed – or hasn’t. Because he is using war as an instrument of Russian policy, when Nato is not doing so, he still holds the cards. Nor did he consider the war a “war of choice”, no matter how crazy we can see his decision to embark on a fight.
The Russian president considers Ukraine not an independent sovereign state but an integral part of the Russian empire. Ukraine’s perfectly legitimate rejection of that assumption makes this an existential struggle for both sides.
Mr. Putin is now fighting for his political survival, just as Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians are fighting for their lives.
As the war drags on, it will pose new challenges. A protracted war would give sanctions more time to take effect, but don’t expect them to split the Russian President from his people any time soon.
Economic wars rarely prevail in isolation. It failed to separate the German people from their leaders until the end of World War I, and it failed completely during the Second World War. Rather, common adversity can rally a nation, while deaths in battle more likely to represent sunk costs than a reason to stop.
The effects of economic warfare are also addressed on those who use it. The war disrupted the globalized economic system in 1914, and it was only finally incorporated again after 1990.
We are dismantling it again. The longer the war in Ukraine drags on, the more tense the unity of NATO and the EU will become. Other domestic impacts will follow as refugees once again spur migration across Europe.
As Russia moves deeper into Ukraine, it threatens the flanks of its Nato neighbors. Nato’s unity will be influenced by the members’ relative proximity to the conflict and its consequences. The US refusal to buy Polish MiG fighters is a foreshadowing of impending tensions.
The popular demand is that Mr. Putin be stopped, not that Nato members march in secret. That was probably Nato’s strategy as well, but it didn’t work and time wasn’t in his favor. (© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2022)
Hew Strachan is an honorary fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews.
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/failure-of-sanctions-has-turned-them-from-a-deterrent-into-an-instrument-of-war-41434835.html The failure of sanctions transformed them from a deterrent into an instrument of war
