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Vladimir Putin announced in a speech last month that Russia had weathered the worst

of the economic sanctions imposed by Western nations. He said that gloomy predictions about the Russian economy's

future didn't come true and that the sanctions had hit foreign economies much harder than they had

hit Russia. He added that the weaponry of sanctions is a double-edged sword and European countries

had dealt a serious blow to their own economies all on their own.

Putin boasted that Russia had gotten inflation under control at 17.6%, saying that it was

below the levels in some European countries. Putin's supporters in the West make similar arguments, mostly because it's easier to question

how effective the sanctions are than to defend the morality of the invasion of a neighboring

country.

At the same conference, Putin raised many eyebrows with his claim that he views the entire former

Soviet Union as being a part

of historical Russia. Economic sanctions have been a tool of statecraft for quite some time,

and it's obvious why nations might favour this approach when dealing with a nuclear-armed

country like Russia. Sanctions are frequently criticized as being

ineffective, but they still appear to have become the policy tool of choice for Western

nations in the post-Cold War period. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, annexing Crimea,

and has been under sanctions ever since.

These much milder sanctions did fail to deter the full scale of invasion that we're seeing

right now, so it's of course worthwhile trying to understand if this approach has a significant

impact or not.

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