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Hello and welcome to the edition podcast. I'm William Moore, the Spectator's Features Editor.

And I'm Laura Prendergars, the Spectator's executive editor.

Today on the podcast we'll be asking if Russian sanctions are playing into Putin's hands.

We'll also be looking at whether

Carrie Johnson gets a hard time from the British public. And finally, we'll be talking about why we

should all love our cars. First, we're joined by the Spectators' Economics editor, Kate Andrews,

and Elizabeth Braw from the American Enterprise Institute to talk about Russian sanctions. Have they backfired?

Kate, in the magazine this week, you write that if the aim of sanctions was to starve the Russian

economy and war machine, then it's hard to call them a success. Can you explain to our listeners

what do you mean by that? So as one Tory MP lamented to me

when I was doing research for this article, it feels as though the European Union and Germany in

particular have polled all of the sanction levers except the one that mattered most, and that was on

Russian energy.

And so while you can point to countless sanctions from freezing the assets of oligarchs to freezing central bank's asset of Putin's sort of war chest reserves in the central bank,

about a third of that or $200 billion has been frozen,

that really key resource energy, the oil and gas, is still free flowing from

Russia into Europe, and Germany alone counts for about a fourth of Putin's income a day,

which is $800 million, so close to a billion dollars a day is going into the Kremlin coffers.

Now, it might be difficult for Putin to spend that money because

of the sanctions. And no doubt if you are living in Russia right now, you feel like you're on the edge

...