U.S. Sanctions on Russia Have Failed Completely. They’ll Keep Failing.

While the world is rightly focused on the Israel-Hamas War, the War in Ukraine has not gone away. In fact, it’s at a turning point where Ukraine’s defeat is unstoppable, and Russian major advances are now getting underway.

No one in the White House or State Department expected the war to be in this condition. The narrative (which they still cling to in some official circles) is that the Russian military had weak leaders along with drunk and demoralized troops. Also, that U.S. wonder weapons (HIMARS, Patriots, javelins, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, F-16s and more) would force Russia out of occupied positions and re-take Crimea and the end result would be civil unrest in Russia and regime change and the end of Putin.

In fact, the opposite has happened. The U.S. and NATO weapons all failed, the Russians proved highly adept at attritional warfare, and Ukraine is suffering horrendous casualties for no territorial gains. There are many reasons for this U.S. failure, which some analysts (including myself) predicted in early 2022.

One of the biggest reasons is the U.S. reliance on economic sanctions aimed at Russia. The U.S. froze the reserves of the Central Bank of Russia (and is now considering converting them to payments to the corrupt oligarchs in Kiev), banned certain Russian oil and natural gas exports, capped the price of Russian oil shipments, prohibited exports of high-tech equipment and semiconductors to Russia, kicked Russia and its banks out of the international payments message system called SWIFT, and much more.

Biden claimed this would destroy the Russian ruble, sink the Russian economy, and lead to a collapse of support for Putin. None of this has happened. As this article reports, the Russian ruble has returned to its recent level of about 100 to the dollar (for most of 2022-2023 the ruble was even stronger at around 70 to the dollar).

The Russian economy may outperform the U.S. economy in 2023. Russian oil sales are at all-time highs. Russia has simply taken the oil it used to sell to Europe and is selling it to China and India instead. Russian inflation is stable, the economy is booming (partly because it’s on a war footing unlike the collective West, which can’t even produce weapons and ammunition to replace Ukrainian losses) and Putin’s popularity is also near all-time highs.

Worse yet, the weaponization of the dollar has led to serious efforts by the BRICS 11 to devise alternative currencies so they will not be victims of future U.S. sanctions that may be aimed at them.

The U.S. military war has been a failure. The U.S. financial war has been a failure. You can add these to the long list of failures attributable to weak and senile leadership from the White House.

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