Remember when everyone thought locking Russia out of SWIFT was a nuclear move?
I think the real nuclear move would be the West giving seized Russian funds to Ukraine.
Not nuclear to Russia ofc, they know they're never seeing that money. Nuclear to the Western financial system of dollars and Euros because nobody will ever want to park their funds in those currencies when they can just be seized and redistributed for political reasons.
There are few interesting lib comments about it here, especially two are fun: one person says the company in title should be nationalized if refusing to give up Russian funds, and second one saying that forfeiting forign assets in case of aggression should be automatic and cite... Syria as example, very visibly avoiding USA.
I'm not sure why anyone thought the US's sanctions were going to matter? Isn't Russia's economy massively backed by trades with countries like Mexico, Brazil, and China?
The West is also helping because it's still buying Russian oil and gas, it's just coming via a more circuitous route so its origin can be hidden. Oil laundering, basically. It's just more expensive now because it's travelling further and there are more middlemen involved. Hilarious really.
From the Wall Street Journal (April 2022) The West Is Still Buying Russian Oil, but It’s Now Harder to Track
If there's anyone who can launder your oil, it's the west lol
This article is from 2 years ago
Correct. I drew attention to the publication year when I posted it - to make the point that people have known for a very long time yet have still not done anything about it... not that they really can (or indeed want to, especially in Europe, and especially in Germany where the economy has been historically very reliant on cheap oil and gas from Russia).
The 2014 sanctions after Crimea and MH17 hit Russia hard. It took 44 months (almost 4 years) before Russia’s GDP growth went back to pre-2014 level. Then, just when Russia was recovering, Covid hit in 2020 and that’s another 12 months of economic hardship.
In comparison, the 2022 sanctions, even though they are far larger in scale, were almost unremarkable (it took only 6 months to recover to 2021 level) and certainly have backfired on the sanctioning countries instead.
Do you think that is in some part due to overuse of sanctions or just that they were better prepared? The more countries you sanction the more the sanctioned countries can just trade with each other (and the more hesitatnt you make third parties about dealing with you).
I think that Russia had some talks about it before they attacked in 2022. Logically they did got some guarantees from China and probably India too before comitting to such risky endeavour.
I’m not sure why anyone thought the US’s sanctions were going to matter? Isn’t Russia’s economy massively backed by trades with countries like Mexico, Brazil, and China?
Historically they did. Historically just the threat of them sent most countries and companies scurrying to comply out of fear of being hit. The US expected them to work. The EU expected them to work. Even many in Russia have been shocked at how resilient their economy has been to it as have many in the global south. This was a damn-breaking moment, the moment everyone in the global south realized you could challenge and resist the US and win and it is why we have this sea-change moment happening.
Edit I came off as excessively harsh, sorry. Let's act like the US sanctions are historically weak and do nothing instead of killing people, bringing down countries and companies, etc. This was not something anyone expected.
TBH, the backbone of Russian economy was built in the USSR with resilience and self-sufficiency as primary objectives, so Russia was better prepared against the sanctions compared to most countries.
I wasn't acting like the sanctions are historically weak? It was an actual question
My apologies. I shouldn't have replied in that way.
it's all good, I probably could have worded my original comment better anyway.
It is also heavily tied to trade with Western Europe in most unusual ways. I.e. turns out, we're buying turkey eggs from Poland, because for some reason, eggs from locally grown turkeys aren't used to expand turkey herds. Another example is metal cutters for industrial manufacturers - turns out we've been buying them from Israel of all places.
Another matter to consider is the scope of yankee sanctions - they don't just sanction a country, they threaten everyone else to stop trading with it.
aren't used to expand turkey herds
I'm pretty sure a group of turkeys isn't called a herd, that's for horses and whatnot. For birds it's usually called a flock but then again it might not apply to turkeys cause English is weird and there's like a hundred of these stupid words for groups of animals and hardly anybody actually uses most of them.
It wasn't this obvious in 2022. China stance was as usual misunderstood by USA, China was quiet about that, but it was in the best interest of China to help Russia (as we tankies see so clearly it's not even worth mentioning), but USA seemed to be really surprised and outraged when China not only didn't joined the sanctions but also started to expand trade with Russia in speed rarily precedented in history before. Same with India, USA seemed to take their participation in sanctions for granted but didn't managed to see Modi government as highly opportunistic, oriented on their own interest, and having stronger contact with reality than the US govt. After those two supported Russia, and USA shown signs of weakness, other global south countries started to take more decided stance opposing USA since now they have something concrete to lean on and don't risk being destroyed like Iraq or Libya.
But it could work, and regardless of real chance USA seemed to take it for granted that it would
VOA is also reporting it https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-economy-grew-in-2023-despite-war-and-sanctions/7478952.html
It is funny that liberals still deny it