Sanctions Against Russia Mustn’t Be Of The “Forever Sanction” Variety

RUSSIA (Washington Insider Magazine) – The massive, multilateral sanctions placed upon Russia for its brazen attack and invasion of Ukraine in the midst of claims – some dubious and some factual – continue to be ramped and ratcheted up by incredible degrees with each passing few days. While the invasion has been ongoing for over a month as of the time this piece was written, it has not been wonderfully successful by Russian standards surely, and their reprioritization towards goals of securing the Donbas region demonstrates this fact as well as any other to date.

While Russia struggles to execute any type of organized effort across Ukraine, great swaths of the world have executed their response with, regarding the scope, remarkable, mutual and multilateral efforts. These efforts, while potentially effective, could also prove harmful in various other ways, such as diplomatic, economic and most definitely within the realm of humanitarian concerns and issues. They must not be utilized against Russia in anywhere near the manner as sanctions have been previously levied against nations like Cuba, Iran or North Korea – applied as what might be called “forever sanctions.”

Those sanctions, while certainly debilitating for each nation, economy, society and people, have not necessarily created the results their engineers previously envisioned. Over the course of a combined nearly 200 years worth of sanctions, only American olive branches have created the change the world seeks, never, in those circumstances, the planned coercion or scarcity. Interestingly, while sanctions regarding Cuba and Iran have been, within the previous decade, lifted at various times, and better relations have been improved during and momentarily after those instances, one might question whether those sanctions were ever even necessary in the first place to achieve what these discussions won for the participating parties; might diplomatically open administrations in the previous decades have reached similar agreements at those times had they had the spirit or will to endeavor for as much?

Sanctions are, after all, barbarism disguised as diplomatic responsibility, despite that they remain the recourse of the current era of diplomacy that we find ourselves in the midst of, in what I often refer to as the end of “The Great Era of Sanction Diplomacy.” Yet returning to the case in hand, there must be, as I’ve referred to them previously as, “diplomatic offramps” for the de-escalation of sanctions in and for Russia. The current swath that is being imposed will absolutely desolate and suffocate Russia should it be applied for too long, and there is no doubt that the sanction regimes applied to those aforementioned nations have yielded truly grotesque results for the people and societies of those polities. 

Make no mistake. The humanitarian disaster in Ukraine of which continues to unfurl will be followed swiftly by the humanitarian crisis in Russia that will likely play out for as long or even longer. The world must be prepared to demonstrate great empathy in the relatively near future, for no matter how long the current Russian President reigns and lives for, it will not be forever, and that is just the fact of the matter; whenever that day comes, whether he be dead or simply retired, the world will have to be ready with arms wide open to embrace the people of Russia who will have been brutalized and traumatized in various, different and similar ways to their Ukrainian neighbors.

The entire world, therefore, must make their intentions quite clear. They must signal that while the actions of the Russian President and his government are detestable and disgusting acts of brutality and international criminality, that, should they relent and come to agreements with the likes of Ukraine, the sanction regime will be lifted as goals and measures are met. The united front of the world must signal that they are not willing to annihilate or suffocate an entire, massive society of some 140 million people as some sacrifice, in order to push the autocrat who rules their nation out of power. 

Just as it might feel as though sanctions of whatever length or size against Russia are morally justifiable in this instance, simply because they are, according to the codes of international diplomatic and communal procedures, violating international custom and law in such egregious manners, it might also feel to many people, that working towards regime change in some active sense vis-a-vis Russia might also be justifiable or warranted when what they have done and tried to do over years is taken into proper consideration. While making that case might have its fair share of supporters around the bar as people are enjoying drinks, the practical truth is that – just as in the first instance at the start of this paragraph – the consequences of attempting to enact such policy in some indefinite manner would prove as deadly and as morally injustifiable in many ways as the Russian invasion of Ukraine was itself. 

Furthermore, it would complicate the already-vague aims and mission that the world has regarding this conflict that they all definitely want no active interest in. The use of sanctions, in this case, were not levied to crucify the Russian people in the first instance, or to push Vladimir Putin from the prestige of power of which he has for so long enjoyed. They were enacted by the world to push Russia and Putin off of and away from Ukraine, to make executing the war against Ukraine as difficult as possible, to push them towards the bargaining table with Ukraine and eventually, towards negotiations and conferences with the rest of the concerned nations of the world too. 

To attempt to prosecute this situation to such extreme ends is to guarantee that this conflict intensifies in, potentially, various different ways as Russia feels increasingly targeted and ostracized without reasonable means by which to extricate itself from this absolutely massive foreign policy blunder. Additionally, as briefly mentioned in the paragraph above, the aims for qualified success in the endeavor then become too great to overcome should regime change become linked to the complete and utter end of sanctions. Were the nation not pushed towards some extreme military decision because of the prospect of indefinite sanctions with no possible recourse out of them, they, at that point, might then be pushed to those limits because of the ultimatum regarding their leadership. 

While economists are concerned with the devastation that these sanctions will mark the Russian society and population with – no matter how long they’re actively in place for – an American Senior Pentagon official believes and recently stated that Russia will leave this conflict weaker across the board than it entered it, within the overall confines of the world and international community of nations of course. This, I think, is an accurate assessment: Russia, like Icarus within Ancient Greek mythology who ignored the words of his father Daedalous and flew too close to the Sun on wings of wax, will suffer as a result of its blunder, and yet, to let or even force the proverbial complete and total drowning of that nation, their society and people, would be barbarism just the same as the violent, militarized murders and destruction of people, communities, cities and societies committed by it.

As Russia will leave this conflict existentially weaker as it stands without the United States or NATO ever actually fighting in this conflict in Ukraine, those allies will have to look to provide Russia with exit routes for their repugnant leader and his disgraced federal government to save some modicum of face within the international community of nations. While neither he nor his machine deserve as much, their people and nation do deserve as much, and their well being must take precedent over looking to punish a maniac; he will live the rest of his days knowing that he is an international war criminal – marked and likely tried in absentia at The Hague – and will never recover either internationally or domestically from this farcical misadventure and act of domestic imperialism. 

His people on the other hand, the great, diverse and remarkable peoples of the Russian Federation, will long live beyond his lifetime and memory, and they deserve the empathy that he refuses either them or the poor innocents of Ukraine. While Ukraine has problems of its own certainly, as human rights reports the world over – and even myself previously – describe and attempt to illustrate to their best abilities, the unilateral invasion of that nation by Russia and military allies is no more the answer to whatever woes ail Ukraine than are forever sanctions the cure for that which sickens Russia. 

When possible in diplomatic and humanitarian questions and circumstances, the people of all involved nations must be taken into consideration and held in the highest regard relative to the next move vis-a-vis foreign policy. With this stated, it is obviously both diplomatically and humanitarianly irresponsible to suffocate Russia indefinitely and without obvious and well-articulated de-escalation off-ramps by which that nation can work to reduce sanctions and save diplomatic face in the midst of what can only be considered a massive, embarrassing failure by the governing, intelligence and military complexes.

The forever sanctions do not work. The focused and short term sanction barely has a track record of having succeeded, and it has recently come into vogue to acknowledge that sanctions have one of the least effective track records of what might be known as popular foreign policy recourses, and for those of us who have stated this for years and years, this is encouraging, yet here we are nonetheless. The world has decided that the sanction regime is the best, safest recourse to this circumstance, and so that is the avenue by which most of the world’s nations are traveling upon currently, regardless of the obvious humanitarian repercussions; sanctions must therefore, as the entire world is using them, be only utilized with the express aim of de-escalating the conflict that Russia began in Ukraine. Period. 

Once those aims and objectives begin to be achieved, the sanctions must melt away and real, diplomatic innovations must take hold of the international relations more firmly. They must work towards creating multilateral agreements in which nations can work together towards more positive, more amicable and more mutual means for shared, collective ends and goals. They must work also to end the reign of the sanction regime in foreign relations and policy, and must work towards developing new roads and avenues by which nations in disagreement might travel, that will bring all concerned nations to more positive conclusions than either armed conflict or the nefarious forever sanction or sanctions can ever provide disagreements or circumstances with.