Insight
Stronger sanctions on Russia: Essential, but not a strategy by Ian Bond, 25 February 2022
The West is rightly responding to Putin’s all-out attack on Ukraine’s territorial integrity with sanctions. But they need to be part of a wider strategy to ensure that he cannot win. Putin has chosen war. Despite the desperate diplomatic efforts of Western leaders, in particular France’s President Emmanuel Macron, on February 24th Russian President Vladimir Putin launched large-scale military action against targets throughout Ukraine. The only question now is how far he can go. The West needs to be clear about the stakes. Putin’s territorial ambitions may be confined to Ukraine (though they may not), but his political ambitions go much further: to make Russia the dominant power on the European continent. He cannot be allowed to succeed. On February 21st Putin announced that he was recognising the independence of the enclaves Russia had created in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Though Western intelligence warned that an attack on Ukraine was imminent, many Western leaders continued to hope that Donetsk and Luhansk would be the limit of Putin’s ambition; carefully-calibrated sanctions were supposed to leave room for an ’off ramp’ that Putin could take. Putin humiliated all those who tried in good faith to find a peaceful way out of the crisis – lying to them about the situation on the ground, forcing them to listen to false accusations that Ukraine was committing genocide and making commitments to withdraw his forces from Belarus that he had no intention of keeping. Perhaps the only function the diplomacy served was to show beyond doubt that Putin cannot be trusted. Now the focus has moved from diplomacy to sanctions. Surprisingly, the EU was the quickest out of the blocks with wide-ranging sanctions – faster than the UK or the US. The package of EU sanctions agreed on February 23rd included all 351 members of the lower house of the Russian parliament, the Duma, who voted in favour of recognising the Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’ and 27 individuals or entities described as contributing “to the undermining or threatening of the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine”. The EU has also restricted economic relations with Donetsk and Luhansk (including banning imports from them) and prohibits “financing the Russian Federation, its government and Central Bank” – shutting them out of the EU’s capital and financial markets. CER INSIGHT: Stronger sanctions on Russia: Essential, but not a strategy 25 February 2022
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