Western Allies Face Frustration Over Russia Sanctions

The Western countries aligned against Russia face growing economic pain as sanctions and embargoes show little impact and no change on the Russian stance.

US officials vowed that Russia’s financial system would be battered if it attacked Ukraine, and President Biden boasted in March that sanctions were “crushing the Russian economy” and that “the ruble is reduced to rubble.”

A White House spokesman said that leaders of the Group of 7 industrial nations will meet in Madrid on Sunday to discuss new plans to further tighten the screws on Russia’s economy.

Russia’s financial system is back to business as usual after a few weeks of severe bank runs and those who thought “that cutting Russia from financing for a few weeks at the beginning of the war would stop the war have proven a failure.

The next step in the conflict between the West and Russia was supposed to be a European boycott on Russian coal, oil and natural gas. It may instead be a gas embargo by Putin on Europe.

The countries of the European Union tend now to accept what some of them have denied for decades. It is that in the eyes of an amoral despot such as Putin, everything is a weapon of war including nuclear equipment, chemical arms, wheat, disinformation and of course energy.