this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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The problem with this take is that why would Russia take pieces of land in Ukraine just to invite unprecedented sanctions against itself? Russia has lost hundreds of billions of US dollar assets and their oligarchs have been hit even harder, with overseas assets and properties seized.
The annexing of Crimea in 2014 invited sanctions that practically erased Russia’s economic growth that had been gaining ground since 2001, which took near 4 years (44 months!) to even get back to the pre-sanctions level (even worse than the 2009 global financial crisis and the Covid recession in 2020). So it’s not like they didn’t anticipate this would happen.
Yes Russia is lucky their economy didn’t collapse, but what is the point of a land grab in Ukraine when you lose businesses from your European partners? Tens of billions and years of construction went into Nord Stream (both pipelines) just to be abandoned, and then bombed? It is clear that Russia felt that it had to make this decision because the situation had devolved to the point where an invasion of Ukraine has become the least worst for them (emphasis here is failure of diplomacy).
The imperialism of the 21st century is one of super-imperialism, where you can simply cut off their financial access to the world’s most liquid asset (US dollar) and watch them struggling to survive. This is how the hegemon gets its “free lunch” from the rest of the world, simply through printing currency out of thin air and having total control of that currency, which comprises 85% of the world’s transaction. And this is why de-dollarization is at the forefront of the countries who wish to escape the claws of US imperialism.
not luck they have spent decades making their economy more sanction proof in the lead up to this as they saw it coming
It’s both, Russia did make its economy more resilient to sanctions, but ultimately it is not an industrial nation but one of resource colony.
Make no mistake, Russia is food and energy self-sufficient, it will survive even in the harshest sanctions, but it would still be very painful for the transition because it lacks many industries. It would have taken years to rebuild the Soviet era industrial supply chain if they were really cut off access to imports from the rest of the world.
Russia got lucky that China and the rest of the world didn’t join the Europeans in sanctioning them. One factor could be that the US overplayed its hands, by seizing all of Russia’s foreign reserves ($300 billion) and cutting off SWIFT access actually had the unintended detrimental consequences as it scared the other countries into thinking that they better find ways to get out of the US dollar regime in one way or another, or this too would be their fate one day if the US isn’t happy with them.
They already knew this, since this behavior from the US is hardly new. Just look at Cuba, Iraq, Iran, DPRK, etc. Although I guess the difference here is scale, since if you sanction Iran or Cuba that's not going to affect most of the world's nations, so it's relatively easy to ignore.
I think it did motivate material actions to some extent though, as we’re seeing with the expansion of BRICS and dedollarization within these countries.