Backfiring of Sanctions Reflects West’s “Hubristic Over-Confidence,” Analysts Say

These sanctions were one of the single most embarrassing things ZOG has ever done. Really, the only thing that compares is the surrender in Afghanistan, and these sanctions were planned by those same people, immediately after that event.

It’s so great that the Western media is beginning to call this out.

The Guardian:

“The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half,” Joe Biden said in March last year, as he heralded sanctions brought against Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, vowed that sanctions were “hitting the Putin system … at its core of power”. Liz Truss, her counterpart in the UK at the time, forecast that Vladimir Putin’s oligarchs would have nowhere to hide. EU sanctions, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said, “are working to cripple Putin’s ability to finance his war machine”.

The language before the invasion had been no less assertive. At a briefing in January 2022, US state department officials said Washington was prepared to implement sanctions “with massive consequences that were not considered in 2014 [when Russia annexed Crimea]. That means the gradualism of the past is out, and this time we’ll start at the top of the escalation ladder and stay there.”

The Institute for International Finance (IIF) predicted a 15% fall in Russian GDP in 2022. JP Morgan envisaged a 12% contraction. Russia’s own technocrats privately warned Putin of a possible 30% fall.

The reality was somewhat different, reflecting what analysts say was a hubristic over-confidence in the west about the speed with which sanctions that were agreed with unprecedented coordination by the G7 could damage Russia.

The Russian economy contracted by only 2.2% last year. Unemployment, according to admittedly dubious official figures, now stands at 3.7 %. The construction sector has been able to grow significantly even if the car and electronics industries have suffered. A bumper harvest has driven growth in the agricultural sector.

Russia is now forecast by the International Monetary Fund to grow faster in 2023 and 2024 than the UK. It is hardly financial apocalypse now.

As the war approaches its one-year anniversary on 24 February, the debate about whether sanctions are effective has intensified.

It is understandable that the west got carried away at the beginning, leading to false expectations of a palace coup,” said Charles Lichfield, a deputy director of the Atlantic Council, a US thinktank.

In the end an international sanctions war is a game of cat and mouse in which both sides look for clues amid the disinformation to try to pre-empt the other’s moves.

Ultimately it is not as decisive as the battlefield, but if the west can stay the course, Putin may yet find his options narrowing. If he survives it will be a huge blow to the power of the dollar, and one that will not go unnoticed in Beijing.

Honestly, I doubted it, but at this point, I think it actually is possible that Ron DeSantis could be brought in to head-up the wars. The Democrats are just too stupid and incompetent, in part because of all this diversity and in part because Jewish nepotism eventually stops victimized institutions from serving their original purpose.

It’s really a complete mess.