To be quite fair, they saw what happened to Russia after the 2014 sanctions (first after Crimea annexation, then, as if that was not enough, another round when MH17 was shot down) which took nearly 4 years to recover to pre-sanctions level. If Russia’s economy was so weak, then if we give them the full treatment, they should collapse overnight, right?
But a lot has changed over the past 9 years as well. The prior sanctions have also accelerated Russia’s effort to build self-resiliency. Russia’s agricultural policies have paid dividends and now they are fully self-sufficient with much surplus to export. Russia spent the last two decades paying off its foreign debt (often to the detriment of its own people), but it also made it one of the few countries with the lowest external debt in the world (~10% of its GDP), which means it is highly resilient to dollar sanctions unlike many countries in the Global South.
Meanwhile, China also had its taste of Trump’s hostility around 2018 and began to re-consider its strategic position, leading to them forging a much closer ties with Russia. A large part of Russia’s economy surviving the current wave of sanctions was also due to China and many Global South countries (thanks to Soviet diplomacy in the past) refusing to participate in the sanctions.
Whereas the 2014 sanctions took 44 months to recover, the far grander 2022 sanctions merely took 6 months to return to the level before the war, even shorter than the Covid pandemic recession in 2020!
To be quite fair, they saw what happened to Russia after the 2014 sanctions (first after Crimea annexation, then, as if that was not enough, another round when MH17 was shot down) which took nearly 4 years to recover to pre-sanctions level. If Russia’s economy was so weak, then if we give them the full treatment, they should collapse overnight, right?
But a lot has changed over the past 9 years as well. The prior sanctions have also accelerated Russia’s effort to build self-resiliency. Russia’s agricultural policies have paid dividends and now they are fully self-sufficient with much surplus to export. Russia spent the last two decades paying off its foreign debt (often to the detriment of its own people), but it also made it one of the few countries with the lowest external debt in the world (~10% of its GDP), which means it is highly resilient to dollar sanctions unlike many countries in the Global South.
Meanwhile, China also had its taste of Trump’s hostility around 2018 and began to re-consider its strategic position, leading to them forging a much closer ties with Russia. A large part of Russia’s economy surviving the current wave of sanctions was also due to China and many Global South countries (thanks to Soviet diplomacy in the past) refusing to participate in the sanctions.
Whereas the 2014 sanctions took 44 months to recover, the far grander 2022 sanctions merely took 6 months to return to the level before the war, even shorter than the Covid pandemic recession in 2020!