Despite the shock and the costs, the sanctions imposed on the Russian economy were in the nature of a gift.
This essay analyzes a few prominent Western assessments, both official and private, of the effect of sanctions on the Russian economy and war effort. It seeks to understand the main goals of sanctions, alongside bases of fact and causal inference that underpin the consensus view that sanctions have been highly effective so far. Such understanding may then help to clarify the relationship between claims made by economist-observers outside Russia and those emerging from sources inside Russia – notably from economists associated with the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) – which draw sharply different inferences from the same facts. We conclude that when applied to a large, resource-rich, technically proficient economy, after a period of shock and adjustments, sanctions are isomorphic to a strict policy of trade protection, industrial policy, and capital controls. These are policies that the Russian government could not plausibly have implemented, even in 2022, on its own initiative.
