"Russia was to be cut off almost entirely, with sanctions and boycotts on all imports and exports save for humanitarian ones such as medicines. Putin’s Russia, went the theory, would be impoverished into surrender,"
Spectator reminds, adding that
"few people in the West are aware of how badly this aspect of the war is going".The article recalls that "it soon became clear that while the West was keen on an economic war, the rest of the world was not". "As its oil and gas exports to Europe fell, Russia quickly upped its exports to China and India – both of which preferred to buy oil at a discount than to make a stand against the invasion of Ukraine," it writes, adding that "some of the Russian oil exported to India appears to have been siphoned back to Europe, with a rise in the number of ships taking refined oil from India through the Suez Canal".
"As we have discovered, non-western countries lack the will to impose sanctions on either Russia or on Russian oligarchs," Spectator stresses.
"The Russian economy has not been destroyed; it has merely been reconfigured, reorientated to look eastwards and southwards rather than westwards," the magazine concludes.
