Sanctions are Chewing, not Biting

The sanctions regime on Russia is now in its fifteenth year, beginning with Russia’s unprovoked and illegal occupation of Georgia in 2008. Admittedly, the sanctions up until 2022 were rather weak, and the ones since then are, shall we say, full of holes. There are some areas, however, that are readily apparent and making a difference, though they are certainly taking their sweet time with it. First, the oil and gas sanctions from the EU are biting down hard in 2023, with Gazprom receiving only one-fifteenth of the profits it did in 2022, which was a bumper year thanks to a spike in prices following the initial invasion. Now that Europe’s largest economies have moved away from Russian supply, the financial effects are measurable. Still, Russia seems to be staving off the worst effects by dismantling the social safety net, eliminating domestic programs, and curtailing spending everywhere except the military. Taxes are being introduced, and ‘voluntary contributions’ from the oligarchs are regularly expected by the Kremlin. Second, while China has skirted the edges of legality with their northern neighbor, the Dragon Empire’s largest companies are not willing to risk being shut out of developed markets. Most notably, Huawei has suspended official deliveries to the angry Bear, and the largest mobile operators in Russia are suffering from an acute lack of base stations to maintain their networks. Currently, there are about thirty thousand operational base stations in Russia, but the networks claim they need eighty thousand for full operability. Finland’s Nokia and Sweden’s Ericsson have suspended relations entirely. <a href="https://medium.com/@dylan_combellick/sanctions-are-chewing-not-biting-4146bbdc73a8">Learn More</a>