Hello and welcome to the battleground podcast with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Today we're delighted to welcome as our guest, Stephanie Baker, an award-winning investigative

reporter at Bloomberg News, who first reported from Moscow in the 1990s, and who was just published

punishing Putin inside the global economic war to bring down Russia. Stephanie, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Now, you note in the book that since the full-scale

invasion of Ukraine, Russia is the most sanctioned country in the world. And yet at the same time,

it's too big to sanction. We've definitely had a sense of this as we followed the story for the last

year and a half on the podcast. But can you just give us a little bit of a sense of the scale of these sanctions

and what they were intended to do rather than what they've actually done? Right. So now there are

almost 20,000 sanctions against Russia amongst the sanction coalition, US, UK, Europe, Australia,

Japan. And by that measure, it's the most sanctioned country in the world.

Now, by other measures, you could argue that Iran is far more isolated from the global economy,

obviously a smaller country, a smaller economy. But what you saw after 2022, this was this rapid

buildup and expansion of the sanctions program

in a way that had never been attempted before. I mean, this, that Putin's full-scale invasion

of Ukraine prompted the biggest coalition of countries to gather together and try to isolate

what was the biggest country ever targeted by sanctions.

Russia is the largest economy and the most integrated in the global economy that's ever been

targeted by these economic penalties. Now, I think initially there was a belief that because the

measures they adopted were so unprecedented, that

it would bring Russia's economy to its knees and perhaps really force Putin to rethink

his invasion. That didn't happen. Yes, within the first month or six weeks, Russia's economy

...