Will sanctions work against Russia?

Originally written on March 7th, 2022.

The government of Russia invaded Ukraine, thereby starting a war. One of the non-direct interventions that almost everybody seems to agree on is necessary is sanctions against Russia.

Of course, you can’t sanction a country, you sanction its citizens. Most people know this, and yet they are still in full support of those sanctions even though they’ll make the life of ordinary Russian citizens miserable.

“That’s the point,” they say, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Let’s put the moral question aside of whether you can sacrifice one group of innocent people for another group of innocent people for your purposes. (The question is very relevant, but moral questions are more challenging to discuss rationally.)

The idea is that the everyday life of Russians will be so much worse that they’ll be spurred into action against Putin and topple him. However, it’s naive to think that this will work.

First of all, Putin is a hard-handed dictator who doesn’t shy away from using violence against the people he rules. Protests began when the war started (without the help of any sanctions), and the authorities arrested and jailed people. If matters turn worse for Russian citizens, surely more people will go on the streets, but the measures used to quell the protests will also be more severe. They will probably fire at people – after all, jail space is limited.

Putin will remain unfazed, though. It’s reasonable to believe that he imbibed the narrative his propaganda ministry fed to the people for years and now believes in his role of fighting against the “fascists of the West.” Whatever his motives for starting the war are, the protests of desperate people will not stop him from trying to fulfil his imagined historical role.

But is it plausible that making the life of ordinary Russians more and more miserable will turn them against Putin? Their quality of life will suffer because of the sanctions imposed upon them by other governments (and corporations), so it’s effortless to say they suffer because of “the West.” And as we know, “the West” has always been against Russia, as their latest actions clearly show. The Russian state-owned media will have a laughingly easy job of convincing most people about who the real enemy is.

The U.S. government enforced heavy sanctions against Iraq in the ’80s that caused a lot of suffering and even death in the population.

“Garfield has recently recalculated his numbers, based on the additional findings of the Ali and Shah study, to arrive at an estimate of approximately 350,000 through 2000. Most of these deaths are associated with sanctions, according to Garfield, but some are also attributable to destruction caused by the Gulf War air campaign, which dropped 90,000 tons of bombs in forty-three days, a far more intensive attack than the current strikes against Afghanistan. The bombing devastated Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, destroying eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and disabling vital water-pumping and sanitation systems. Untreated sewage flowed into rivers used for drinking water, resulting in a rapid spread of infectious disease. Comprehensive trade sanctions compounded the effects of the war, making it difficult to rebuild, and adding new horrors of hunger and malnutrition.”

And yet, Saddam was still very much in charge when the U.S invasion began, causing further damage. So when sanctions don’t lead to enough suffering, I guess the unwilling population can still be bombed to death, directly or via a proxy.