From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernici. This is The Daily.

To punish Russia for invading Ukraine, the US and Europe have targeted Russia's richest

businessmen with a series of strict sanctions that have been described as a financial death penalty.

Today, I spoke with my colleague, Matt Apuzzo, about the logic of punishing oligarchs and whether

it may actually change the course of the war.

It's Tuesday, March 22nd.

Matt, we've been hearing a lot over the past couple of weeks about the richest Russians in the

world and Western governments' attempts at going after their wealth. And I wanted to start with

a really basic kind of explainer about who they are.

Yeah, when you hear oligarchs, it means two things. One, you're talking about somebody who's

very, very rich in Russia. But being rich in and of itself doesn't mean you're in oligarch.

You also have to be in proximity to power, if to be benefiting from the government, and you also

typically have government sway. Got it. So what exactly are the Western governments doing to

these rich, politically connected Russians? So what you're seeing is you're seeing governments saying,

you can't do business with these oligarchs. They can't be your customers, they can't be your

suppliers. They're on a blacklist. The idea is we're going to cut off all of these rich,

powerful guys from essentially the Western economies. So you cut all these people out of Western

economies. And then what? What's supposed to happen next? Well, it's twofold. So the thinking goes

that first, if you profit from the government committing violations or otherwise sort of

trampling all over international norms, well, then Western governments are saying, you're making

money off of that. So we're cutting you off. That's the first part. The second part is actually,

I think the bigger thing, which is the theory is if we blacklist Russians who are rich and powerful,

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