A super-yacht docked in Gibraltar, owned by Russia’s largest steel pipe maker, and was detained by the authorities as a result of British and European sanctions.
The detainment is due to the ongoing Moscow invasion of Ukraine which has resulted in sanctions on unprecedented and expansive scales. Britain and other EU countries have imposed sanctions on hundreds of Russian individuals that have ties with Vladimir Putin last week. In theory, target elites should not be as free from harsh punishments as much as the population. The motivation behind sanctions of the Russian oligarchs and elites is to weaken the support structure of Putin’s regime. The Biden administration plans to work with European countries to target Russian oligarchs with sanctions that will result in seizing “their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets.” According to the New York Times, the total number of sanctioned Russian-born billionaires is now 25.
The United States has been one of the most prolific and prominent actors to employ economic coercion. It appears that the use of sanctions will only increase as major powers have been more willing to apply economic coercion on countries rather than using military interventions since the end of the Cold War.
The Russian economy has struggled mightily as a result of the current economic coercion imposed by western countries. The Russian government was barred from accessing $600 billion in reserves held by the Central Bank of Russia and the coordinated action by western countries had further cut Russia’s ties with other major powers within the global financial system. Smaller European countries with closer ties to Russia are also affected as a result. A great portion of Russia’s economy relies on the production of petroleum, natural gas, wheat, and certain metals.
The assumption that harsh economic sanctions will provide an incentive for cooperation is not necessarily justified. It is important to ask whether those sanctions are justified and ask the potential implications on how countries will make political decisions in the future. Will countries strive to be more isolated and rely less on other countries by reducing trades, foreign banking, and investments or will they try to become more integrated and in the global financial system? In other words, will current sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU countries result in countries seeking to be more interdependent and more cooperative with each other?
These kinds of questions are important to ask in the long run, but when the only other option in the population’s minds is violent war and civilian casualties for the countries imposing the sanctions, other solutions must be found and proposed before urging a change in policy. If the Russo-Ukrainian war is to continue for a while longer, then the countries imposing sanctions will likely need to rethink their approach to encouraging peace.
