Russian Riddle

According to Anne Applebaum, a foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post, “The Russians have a very long record of hacking emails, making secret tapes, or finding what they call ‘Компромат’ or compromising information about somebody, and publishing it at a crucial moment in a political cycle in order to disrupt that cycle. These Kremlin-backed hackers use these leaks for a simple goal: To create confusion about a candidate the Russian government opposes.”

According to an unclassified document released by the intelligence community, Russia wanted Trump to win. Though the main reason for imposing US sanctions against Russia is Kremlin’s attempts to poison the opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018. Recently Biden vowed that Russian President Vladimir Putin would “pay a price” for interferring with the 2020 presidential election and authorizing efforts to damage the Biden campaign through covert operations.

With this revelation and Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office, the idea to ramp up sanctions against Russia, which stands accused of deploying hackers, is but obvious. The first sanction against Russia was introduced in March 2014 by the EU, the US and a number of other states in connection with the situation in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. These were individual sanctions against specific people and companies that were not significant to the Russian economy as a whole.

In July 2014, additional sectoral sanctions were imposed limiting foreign financing for leading public banks and oil and gas companies and restricting Russian oil and gas companies’ access to advanced production technologies. In response, Russia imposed an embargo on a large number of agricultural products from Western countries in August 2014. Today, there seems to be no chance of the sanctions being lifted any time soon as there has been a consensus among Western governments in recent years that economic sanctions on Russia are working and need to be extended. At the same time, others in the West criticize the current sanctions as being too weak.

Russia is of the view that the sanctions have not made any apparent dent to its economy dand hopes that the situation will eventually persuade Western governments to withdraw the sanctions. In fact, the Russians believe that sanctions are hitting Western countries harder than Russia itself. Economists, however, believe that the economic sanctions have weakened the Russian economy slightly.

The recent message from President Biden to Russian President Vladimir Putin - let’s talk - is interesting and even encouraging. Political observers term this move as an effort to present an incentive to Russia to come back to the table.

The move has come at a time when the average Russian’s perception of the United States and the European Union has worsened substantially. According to the Levada Center, Russia’s leading independent polling agency, the number of Russians with a positive perception of the United States declined from 43 percent in January 2014 to 31 percent in September 2017, hitting an all-time low of 12 percent in January 2015. A similar pattern was recorded regarding the European Union with the number declining from 51 percent in January 2014 to 38 percent in August 2017 while hitting an all-time low of 19 percent in September 2015.

The Russians believe that these unforeseen consequences have further strengthened Vladimir Putin’s hold on Russia. “Our President benefits from the lack of ideas and worsening living conditions that make him look like a defender of Russia from the Western world. According to Levada Center, Mr. Putin’s approval ranking has skyrocketed from 65 percent in January 2014 to 82 percent in October 2017, with the highest approval, 89 percent, in June 2015.”

If we study the overall result of the sanctions, we may conclude that the policies were at least successful at restraining Russian militarism. But the fact remains that Russia is still in control of Crimea, and the situation in Eastern Ukraine has not changed either. Moreover, the pressure is building up in the Baltic States due to the accumulation of Russian military near the border; this military is also involved in the Syrian conflict.

In short, if sanctions have so far failed to fulfill their main goal, it doesn’t make much sense to punish innocent people whose hearts and minds one wishes to win over. A Russian rightly said that, if the United States and its allies truly wish to export their values to Russia, they should begin by eliminating economic sanctions that put an unnecessary economic burden on those who have no say on influencing Russia’s foreign policy.

The elimination of sanctions will in fact, allow for the flow of ideas about economic and personal liberty since more Russians would be able to travel and observe different ways of life.