Two opposite illusions have grown up around the sanctions imposed on Russia, and the strange thing is that the same people often hold both at once. The first illusion is that sanctions are useless theatre — a way for Western governments to look busy, a press release that hurts no one, a gesture that the Kremlin shrugs off while the oil keeps flowing and the missiles keep falling. The second illusion is the mirror image: that sanctions are a kind of secret weapon, that if only they were tightened enough they would strangle the dictatorship into collapse, turn the population against the war, and bring peace without anyone having to fight for it. Both of these are wrong, and they are wrong in instructive ways. The truth lies in the uncomfortable middle, where most true things live. Sanctions cannot end this war by themselves. But they are very far from nothing. Understanding exactly what they can and cannot do is not an academic exercise; it is the difference between spending Western leverage where it bites and squandering it on fantasies.

Let me begin by clearing away the fantasy, because it is the more dangerous of the two. The seductive idea is that economic pain is a substitute for force — that you can avoid the grim business of weapons and battlefields by simply making life inside Russia unbearable until the system cracks. This is the comforting theory of peace-through-sanctions, and it deserves to be taken apart link by link, because it is built as a chain of causation, and the chain breaks at the very first link.

The argument runs like this: sanctions worsen ordinary life inside Russia; worsened life raises antiwar sentiment; rising antiwar sentiment makes the dictator fear for his own position; and fear of overthrow forces him to stop the war. It sounds plausible until you test each step against what has actually happened. Life inside Russia has, in fact, already worsened under sanctions. And yet antiwar sentiment has not risen in any measurable way, and no mechanism for the regime’s removal exists. The chain snaps immediately: misery does not convert into political pressure, and political pressure, even if it existed, has nowhere to go in a system that has abolished every lever for replacing its ruler. Sanctions, on this honest accounting, are like a drug that lowers a fever without touching the underlying disease. They ease a symptom. They do not cure anything.

The deeper error is a misunderstanding of where revolutions come from. People imagine that poverty breeds revolt — that if you impoverish a population enough, it will rise. The historical record says the opposite. Revolutions arise not from poverty itself but from a sharp gap between rising expectations and a reality that suddenly disappoints them. Impoverishment does not radicalize people; it exhausts them. It drives them down into the daily grind of mere survival, where there is no energy left for politics, let alone for the dangerous work of confronting an armed state. A hungry man does not storm the palace; he queues for bread. This is why the old fantasy of the “refrigerator defeating the television” — the belief that an empty fridge will eventually overpower the propaganda on the screen — is a fantasy. The television wins. We have the proof in front of us: sanctions did not topple the theocracy in Iran, and they did not topple the regime in North Korea. Both have absorbed decades of economic isolation and remain standing. There is no reason to expect Russia to behave differently, and every reason to expect it to behave the same.

There is a further, crucial point about this particular dictator that demolishes the economic theory of his behavior. One can imagine a tyrant who genuinely cares about his country’s prosperity — a “large-scale villain,” monstrous but rational, whose evil is aimed at building some future empire and who therefore weighs economic costs because he needs the economy to realize his ambitions. Stalin, for all his horror, was a villain of that kind: his evil was aimed at the future, and he cared about the machine that would carry him there. Putin is a villain of a smaller, pettier kind, and his evil is aimed not at the future but at the past. He is indifferent to Russia’s economy in any way that matters to the calculation we are making. Corporate exits, a collapsing currency, sanctions biting into industry — to him these are secondary, the breakage of a man who was never going to pay the bill anyway. If the ruler does not care whether the economy thrives, then ruining the economy does not give you a hold on him. The single variable that can actually constrain such a man is not the size of his deficit. It is the depth of his defeat on the battlefield.

The Embargo That Cannot Exist

So much for sanctions as a substitute for force. But perhaps, the optimist replies, the problem is merely that the sanctions so far have been too soft. Surely a total embargo — a complete severing of Russia from the world economy — would do what the partial measures cannot. Here we run into a hard fact about the shape of the world, and it is worth stating bluntly: a total embargo is not a policy that has not yet been tried. It is a policy that cannot exist.

The reason is that the world economy is not the West. India will not join an embargo. China will not join an embargo. Large parts of Latin America will not join. These are not marginal players whose abstention is a rounding error; they are vast economies, and as long as they trade with Russia there is no wall around it, only a fence with enormous gates standing open. The only way to close those gates would be secondary sanctions — punishing India and China and everyone else for the crime of trading with Moscow. But that is not a sanctions regime against Russia; it is an economic war against the entire Global South, waged by a West that would inflict grave damage on itself in the attempt and could not win it. You cannot embargo a country that half the planet refuses to embargo. Sanctions can hurt Russia — they genuinely degrade its economic life — but they can never, by this route, deliver victory. The embargo that would supposedly do the job is a thing that exists only on paper.

A close cousin of the embargo fantasy is the dream of dethroning the dollar — which appears in this debate as a Russian hope rather than a Western tool, but it belongs here because it teaches the same lesson about the limits of decree. Every so often someone announces that the dollar’s reign is ending, that a new currency will rise to replace it and free its users from the reach of Western financial pressure. The BRICS push for a common currency in the summer of 2023 was the latest of these attempts, and it collapsed almost immediately when South Africa balked. It collapsed for a reason that no summit can legislate away: a currency’s strength does not come from a decree or a founding treaty. It comes from trust. The dollar holds roughly sixty percent of global reserves not because anyone ordered it to but because the world believes in it; the yuan, for all of China’s size, holds only a few percent, because that belief is not there. The only party that genuinely needs an alternative is a Russia desperate to evade sanctions — and a currency built to serve one sanctioned member would be a useless simulacrum that shrank everyone else’s exports. You cannot decree trust into existence. This is precisely why financial pressure, properly applied, is more durable than its critics admit: it rests on something — confidence — that the other side cannot simply vote to replace.

The Blunt Instrument Hits the Wrong People

There is a second indictment of sanctions, separate from their inability to topple anyone, and it is the one that ought to trouble their advocates most: clumsy sanctions hit the wrong people. They are sold as instruments of collective responsibility, a way to make Russians feel the cost of their state’s war. In practice the blunt versions invert that logic. They fall hardest on the very Russians who oppose the war and fled their country to escape persecution, while the regime’s actual servants are left untouched.

Consider how this works on the ground. An émigré who left in disgust at the war finds that his bank cards no longer function, that he cannot rent a hotel room, that he cannot get work, that doors close across Europe simply because of the passport he carries. The practical message to such a person is brutal in its absurdity: go back and sit in a Russian prison. Meanwhile the propagandist who stayed behind, who manufactures the lies that keep the war going, keeps his comfortable salary inside Russia, and on the rare occasion that a nominal sanction touches him, the state compensates him for the loss. The “selective bomb” lands on the regime’s opponents and spares its enablers. This is not an argument against sanctions as such; it is an argument against stupid sanctions, against measures designed for the satisfaction of looking tough rather than for the effect of actually hurting the war.

The same lesson applies to one of the cruder demands one hears — that the West should simply close its borders to Russians altogether. Closing borders does nothing to degrade Russia’s military potential. A visa ban does not ground a single bomber or empty a single shell. The measures that would actually bite are of a completely different character, and they point us, at last, toward what sanctions can really do. Two of them stand out. The first is a genuine energy embargo, because energy money is war money: Europe handed Russia something on the order of eighty billion for its oil and gas, and that money bought the missiles now falling on Ukrainian cities. The second is shutting down the grey-market channels that smuggle Western electronics into Russia, because nearly every modern Russian weapon depends on those chips. A man barred from a European holiday still builds his missiles; a man cut off from his oil revenue and his microchips does not. The difference between those two kinds of measure is the difference between theatre and attrition.

Where the Real Leverage Lives

Now we can state the positive case, which is narrower than the enthusiasts want and far larger than the cynics admit. Sanctions cannot win the war. But aimed with precision at the war economy, they can drain the resource the war runs on — and here a single fact decides everything. This regime runs out of money before it runs out of men. The manpower-exhaustion argument, the hope that Russia will simply run dry of soldiers, misses that the financial clock is running faster than the human one — and that Ukraine has the resources of Europe behind it, on the order of ninety billion euros pledged, while Russia, for all its size, has no one. The contest is not only about bodies. It is about money, and money is the side of the ledger where Russia is genuinely vulnerable.

So where, precisely, does the leverage live? Three places, all of them unglamorous, all of them about the war economy rather than the population. The first is the frozen reserves. The bulk of Russia’s central-bank money sits immobilized abroad, and using those assets to fund Ukraine — including its defense industry — would be a near-unprecedented and powerful measure, better than any ordinary sanction. The difficulty is real and worth naming honestly: only a small fraction of the assets, perhaps five percent, sits within American reach; the great mass of it is held in Belgian banks. When Speaker Johnson speaks enthusiastically of seizing Russian money, he is in a sense pointing at a sack he does not actually hold. The political will and the legal path remain distant. But the prize is genuine, and it is the closest thing to a decisive economic measure that exists.

The second place is the shadow fleet — and this is the true vulnerable point, the needle in the egg in the duck in Putin’s Koschei, to borrow the old fairy tale of the deathless villain whose life is hidden in a single fragile object. The fleet of obscure, reflagged tankers ships something like half of all Russian oil exports, and that oil funds essentially the entire war budget. It is also a slow ecological catastrophe waiting to happen, as these aging, uninsured vessels prowl crowded seas. The vulnerability is glaring. A shadow tanker once blocked the Bosphorus; Finland detained another after it dragged its anchor across the seabed and severed a power cable running to Estonia. These ships can be stopped under maritime law without flooding any battlefield with weapons. And yet the Western effort against them has been almost embarrassingly feeble — only some fifty of more than a thousand such ships sanctioned, like trying to clear an infestation by catching cockroaches one at a time. The weakness of the effort is so striking that it invites uncomfortable questions about whether the will to choke off the oil money is really there. If there is a single point where economic pressure could matter most, this is it.

The third is the war economy itself, watched in its own internal arithmetic. Russia funds its war as the privileged “beloved daughter” of the budget while the civilian sphere is the neglected stepdaughter, paid for out of whatever is left over. The military share of spending swelled past forty percent of the budget, and the result showed itself with brutal clarity in the winter of 2024, when an infrastructure collapse left millions of people across more than forty regions without heat or water or gas in temperatures around minus thirty-four, even as the financing meant to keep those systems alive was set to be more than halved. A regime that has made war its mode of existence structurally cannot care for its own people; it has chosen which daughter to feed. That choice is a vulnerability, because the war economy is not infinite, and every measure that narrows its revenue — sanctions on the oil trade, the seizure of reserves, and, as a complement rather than a substitute, the strikes that Ukraine itself lands on Russia’s refineries — pushes the moment when the money runs out a little closer.

The Tourniquet, Not the Weapon

It is worth pausing on the one apparent exception to the rule that sanctions cannot move this dictator personally — the personal sanctions aimed at Putin himself. When Biden publicly threatened to sanction Putin by name, it functioned less as an economic measure than as a humiliation: a green laser dot placed on the dictator’s forehead, an indignity no Soviet or Russian leader had suffered from an American president, not Stalin, not Khrushchev, not Brezhnev. That a soft-spoken, occasionally stumbling Biden — not some thundering figure out of the Churchill or Reagan mold — was the one to do it only sharpened the insult to a man who styles himself an alpha among rulers. But notice what this is and is not. It is a political act, a puncturing of prestige. It is not a lever on his decisions, and we should not confuse the satisfaction of the gesture with strategic effect. The personal sanction wounds the vanity; it does not drain the treasury.

And here is the warning that closes the case from the other direction. Even a sharp collapse in oil revenue will not, by itself, force this war to end. When Russian crude fell to something like thirty-five dollars a barrel — below the forty-dollar threshold once spoken of as a catastrophe — it was a warning bell, not a war-stopper. The war is an end in itself for the man waging it, not an economic calculation he will abandon when the numbers turn red. He has gold reserves to burn, credit lines from China to draw on, and a population he can go on plundering. Strangle the oil price tomorrow and the war does not stop tomorrow. It is squeezed, not ended.

That is the whole truth about sanctions, stated without either illusion. They are not a weapon that wins the war; the cynics who call them empty theatre are wrong, but so are the dreamers who imagine them as a bloodless path to victory. The most honest image is a medical one. Sanctions are a tourniquet. They do not kill the enemy and they do not heal the wound; they slow the bleeding of the resource the war runs on, buying time and narrowing the aggressor’s options, while the decisive work is done elsewhere — on the battlefield, by force. A tourniquet applied while no one tends the wound itself accomplishes nothing. Applied precisely, in combination with the fighting, it can be the difference between an enemy who can afford to keep killing and one who cannot. The task is not to choose between believing in sanctions and dismissing them. It is to stop asking sanctions to do the one thing they can never do — end the war on their own — and to demand instead that they do, ruthlessly and at last seriously, the things they actually can: freeze the reserves, sink the shadow fleet’s business, and starve the beloved daughter of her feast.