The West’s Economic War on Russia Has Failed, by John V. Walsh

Russia has already won the economic sanctions war waged against it. Which means the West lost. It will lose the military war, too. From John V. Walsh at antiwar.com:

The US with its EU vassals in tow has carried out a two-pronged attack on Russia. The first is Joe Biden’s cruel proxy war on Russia, with its cynical use of Ukrainians as cannon fodder. The second prong is the sanctions war designed to destroy Russia’s economy.

The economic war is a failure. Russia has won. This verdict comes not from a Russia-friendly source but from two well-known British publications. One is the UK’s oldest political magazine, The Spectator. The other is The Daily Telegraph, a British broadsheet that supports the Ukraine war and has always endorsed Conservative candidates. Boris Johnson was once the editor of the former and a columnist for the latter.

This writer, no follower of the British press, was made aware of both pieces by Alexander Mercouris who discussed the articles on his own YouTube channel both here and, together with his partner Alex Christoforou, on The Duran Channel here. (I cannot recommend these sites highly enough for their daily posts on geopolitics, with a focus on the crisis in Ukraine and Europe.)

The Spectator Admits Failure in the Economic War on Russia

The first, the Spectator article, titled bluntly “Why the economic war against Russia has failed,” reads in part:

“The other prong, though, has turned out to be blunt: the plan to wage economic war with Moscow, unleashing financial shock and awe on a scale never seen before. 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.” (The brutality of the phrase “impoverished into surrender” slips so easily onto the page of this piece, because it is standard Western imperial behavior, now normalized. ~ jw)

“Few people in the West are aware of how badly this aspect of the war is going. Europe has itself paid a high price to effect a partial boycott of Russian oil and gas. ….”

“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. Worse, 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.

“The West embarked on its sanctions war with an exaggerated sense of its own influence around the world. As we have discovered, non-western countries lack the will (sic!) to impose sanctions on either Russia or on Russian oligarchs. The results of the miscalculation are there for all to see. In April last year, the IMF forecast that the Russian economy would contract by 8.5 per cent in 2022 and by a further 2.3 per cent this year. As it turned out, GDP fell by just 2.1 per cent last year, and this year the IMF is forecasting a small rise of 0.7 per cent. … The Russian economy has not been destroyed; it has merely been reconfigured, reorientated to look eastwards and southwards rather than westwards.”

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