The Russians have devised impressive workarounds. From Martin Jay at strategic-culture.su:
Sanctions against Russia from the West have so spectacularly failed that we can only assume that Russia was preparing for them and has become stronger despite of them.
Does anyone believe that Trump’s international economic strategy has any merit whatsoever? Can we really assume that he knows what he’s doing when he imposes sanctions on countries that he feels are harming national interests, only when we see that they backfire on American workers?
Secondary sanctions are almost impossible to implement. You would have thought that Trump would have learnt that when, in his first term, he imposed them on Turkey, China, South Korea and India against buying Iranian oil. At first, they seemed to work. But it didn’t take long for China to create ‘go arounds’ and to work out a fix whereby they could still buy cheap oil from Tehran and make it look as though they weren’t. And then the rest followed.
And now it would seem that Trump still doesn’t get it. Yet it’s not just Trump, but also the European Union and its member states. Any economics student will tell you that the German economy is falling apart at quite an alarming rate or that the UK will need a massive IMF bailout within a year, following those economies’ demise linked to funding the Ukraine war and also no longer buying cheap Russian oil. Did sanctions against Russia help any western country? Of course not.
Just recently the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil and their subsidiaries while the EU more or less at the same time officially implemented its 19th package of sanctions against Moscow, targeting over 117 vessels from what Brussels claims is a Russian “shadow fleet,” of vessels registered in different countries but supposedly owned by Russian individuals or companies.
We will punish you for trading with gas station and economy is honk honk?