Western Sanctions haven’t Undermined Putin’s Ability to Wage War Now and Made It More Likely Moscow will Do So in the Future, New Book Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 12 – Western sanctions have not undermined Putin’s ability to wage war now, Sergey Aleksashenko, Vladislav Inozemtsev and Dmitry Nekrasov argue. But they have prompted him to forego technological modernization and instead militarize the Russian economy, thereby making it more likely the Kremlin will continue to wage wars in the future.
    They make that case in a new book, Dictator’s Reliable Rear: Russian Economy at the Time of War (in English; Cyprus, 48 pp., the full text of which is available at https://case-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/case-241112-en_fin2_compressed.pdf and summarized at istories.media/opinions/2024/11/13/sumasshedshaya-rossiya-eto-nadolgo/).
    According to the three economists, Western hopes that the war and sanctions “would undermine the Russian economy and make Putin stop have dissipated.” They have put the Russian economy on track to degradation but that will affect Russian policies only long after Putin is gone. They won’t affect his approach or the new Russian militarism.
    Moreover, they say, “the Russian economy has been able to withstand the onslaught of sanctions because it remained market-oriented, the world could not refuse Russian oil, and the West could not isolate Russia on the world stage” and because the technocrats running the economy have been so competent and professional.
    “Russia’s domestic capacity to stimulate demand was clearly underestimated,” and “for the first time since the end of the 17th century, Russia has created a mercenary army with wages paid to soldiers being several times higher than the national average” and with “a boom in household incomes” generally and inflation accepted as the price of all this.
    This is not to say that sanctions haven’t mattered, the three say. But they have mattered in ways that will have an impact not now but in the longer term – and not always in ways that the West will like. Russia’s economy will fall behind the West technologically over time, but Moscow will remain militaristic and work to destroy the international economic system.
    “Over the past century,” the three write, “Western democracies have faced dictatorships twice, once the fascist regimes and then the communist ones. In the first case, the confrontation grew into a global military conflict while in the second, that was avoided by winning the economic competition.”
    But now, they conclude, “the West should not count on a repeat of the second scenario: Russia is still far below the level of military spending the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and it has a market economy,” one that allows it to act with far greater flexibility than its Soviet predecessor did.