Argue for or against the business and economic sanctions imposed by NATO, European Union, UN

Members, and the US against Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

Eight years ago, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, the U.S. and its allies harshly
condemned the invasion and imposed economic sanctions on Russia.

It barely seemed to matter.

Russia still controls Crimea. Russia’s economy, after going through a recession, soon started growing
again. President Vladimir Putin remains firmly in control of his government — and has now begun
another invasion, this time of eastern Ukraine.

In response, President Biden yesterday announced a new set of sanctions, imposed in tandem with
Britain and the European Union. Putin’s aggression, Biden said, is “a flagrant violation of international
law, and it demands a firm response from the international community.” Biden also signaled that more
sanctions may follow.

Targeted and weak

The 2014 sanctions against Russia did have some effect — arguably more than many people have
realized. They made it harder for Russian banks to obtain foreign loans and restricted Western
companies from working with Russian oil companies, among other steps.

By the summer of 2014, Russia’s economy was shrinking, and it continued shrinking for two years. The
value of the ruble plunged on global markets, increasing the price of many goods for companies and
consumers. Russian businesses had a harder time raising money for new projects.

These economic problems seem to have softened Putin’s domestic support. His approval rating among
Russians initially surged after the Crimea invasion — to around 80 percent — before falling. It has
hovered between 60 percent and 65 percent for much of the past two years, according to the Levada
Center. Last year, opposition groups held some of the largest protests of Putin’s nearly two decades in
power.

The sanctions might even have been painful enough to have deterred Putin from invading eastern
Ukraine in 2014, which he seemed to be planning, as Anders Aslund and Maria Snegovaya have argued
in an Atlantic Council report.

Still, the sanctions clearly did not reorder Russian politics. Putin, after all, moved to claim eastern
Ukraine this week. Experts say that the sanctions’ limited effect is not surprising, because they were less
ambitious than the sanctions the U.S. has imposed on other countries that have flouted global rules, like
Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.
“In 2014, when Putin invaded Ukraine the first time and annexed Crimea, the West acted too slowly and
timidly initially,” Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, told me yesterday.

One reason is that the 2014 sanctions were the product of negotiations with European countries that
wanted to be more cautious than the U.S. The sanctions were also intentionally narrow, designed to
hurt sectors of the economy with close ties to Putin’s regime while minimizing the effect on most
Russians and on the global economy.

The reality is that for sanctions to have big political repercussions, they often need to be harsh. “‘Smart’
or ‘targeted’ sanctions won’t work,” Edward Fishman and Chris Miller, two international-relations
experts, recently wrote in Politico. “To really impose pain on Russia, the U.S. and Europe will have to
bear some burden, too — although, fortunately, there are ways to minimize the fallout for Western
economies.”

Biden acknowledged as much in his remarks at the White House yesterday. “Defending freedom will
have costs, for us as well and here at home,” he said. “We need to be honest about that.” He added that
he would take steps intended to minimize the increase in gas prices.

This is the approach that the U.S. took toward Iran more than a decade ago. It imposed tough sanctions,
despite their likely effect on world oil markets and the damage to Iranians’ living standards. Those
sanctions helped push Iran’s regime to negotiate over its nuclear program.

In Russia’s case, a more aggressive set of sanctions would start with a refusal to buy its oil — by far
Russia’s biggest revenue source — perhaps phased in to mitigate the price increases on global markets.
It could also involve restricting exports to Russia, like automobile parts and computers, or forbidding
other banks from working with Russian banks.

Russia would still have access to parts of the global economy, especially if China continued working with
it. But the effect could nonetheless be substantial, because Russia’s economy is now quite integrated
with the European and U.S. economies.

More to come?

Which path are Biden and the E.U. choosing?

For now, they have imposed sanctions that Biden said went beyond the 2014 sanctions while still falling
well short of what the U.S. and Europe could impose. The measures include blocking Russia’s
government from borrowing money in Western financial markets and cutting off two large Russian
banks from the U.S. financial system.
In the short term, those sanctions will almost certainly not cause Putin to stop menacing Ukraine.
“Russia right now is sitting on quite a pile of extra cash,” Melissa Eddy, a Times correspondent in Berlin,
told my colleague Claire Moses. “They have a war chest.”

But there are two big uncertainties: whether the sanctions hurt Russia’s economy once that war chest is
drawn down; and whether the U.S. and Europe will impose tougher sanctions if Putin continues his war.

“The U.S. and the E.U. have worked hard over eight weeks to pull together what would be a serious,
painful, massive package of sanctions that is designed to hurt,” Steven Erlanger, The Times’s chief
diplomatic correspondent in Europe, told us. They have not yet enacted all of those potential sanctions.
But yesterday’s announcement, Steven added, “gives them room to hit Putin harder if he does more.”

What is at the root of this invasion? Russia considers Ukraine within its natural sphere of influence, and
it has grown unnerved at Ukraine’s closeness with the West and the prospect that the country might
join NATO or the European Union. While Ukraine is part of neither, it receives financial and military aid
from the United States and Europe.

Are these tensions just starting now? Antagonism between the two nations has been simmering since
2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, after an uprising in Ukraine replaced
their Russia-friendly president with a pro-Western government. Then, Russia annexed Crimea and
inspired a separatist movement in the east. A cease-fire was negotiated in 2015, but fighting has
continued.

How did this invasion unfold? After amassing a military presence near the Ukrainian border for months,
on Feb. 21, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signed decrees recognizing two pro-Russian breakaway
regions in eastern Ukraine. On Feb. 23, he declared the start of a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Several attacks on cities around the country have since unfolded.

What has Mr. Putin said about the attacks? Mr. Putin said he was acting after receiving a plea for
assistance from the leaders of the Russian-backed separatist territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, citing
the false accusation that Ukrainian forces had been carrying out ethnic cleansing there and arguing that
the very idea of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction.
How has Ukraine responded? On Feb. 23, Ukraine declared a 30-day state of emergency as cyberattacks
knocked out government institutions. Following the beginning of the attacks, Volodymyr Zelensky,
Ukraine’s president, declared martial law. The foreign minister called the attacks “a full-scale invasion”
and called on the world to “stop Putin.”

How has the rest of the world reacted? The United States, the European Union and others have
condemned Russia’s aggression and begun issuing economic sanctions against Russia. Germany
announced on Feb. 23 that it would halt certification of a gas pipeline linking it with Russia. China
refused to call the attack an “invasion,” but did call for dialogue.

How could this affect the economy? Russia controls vast global resources — natural gas, oil, wheat,
palladium and nickel in particular — so the conflict could have far-reaching consequences, prompting
spikes in energy and food prices and spooking investors. Global banks are also bracing for the effects of
sanctions.