When it comes to Putin, sanctions may have limits as a tool of coercion

When Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech to the nation Monday night, setting the stage for a new Russian military intervention in neighboring Ukraine, he characterized sanctions as a weapon Western powers would use against Moscow no matter what.

“They have one goal: to restrain the development of Russia,” Putin said, arguing that the West will always find a new false pretext for sanctions. He then signed orders recognizing the independence of two separatist regions in Ukraine and sent Russian forces onto their territory for “peacekeeping” purposes – in what President Biden called the beginning of an invasion.

The defiant actions by the Russian leader demonstrated the limits of relying on the threat of economic pain to change behavior by a government such as Putin’s – a highly personalist regime that has weathered Western sanctions for eight years, elevated hard-liner members of the security services to its most influential positions and clamped down on domestic dissent.

For months, top U.S. and European officials have warned the Russian leader he will face severe economic consequences should he invade Ukraine. But as the crisis escalates, raising the risk that the 190,000 Russian troops and enabling forces around Ukraine will mount a large-scale invasion, Washington is facing the reality that even the harshest sanctions may have limits.

“When it comes to major military or national security issues, this type of coercion – punitive economic measures – rarely works,” said Dursun Peksen, a political science professor at the University of Memphis who studies the effectiveness of sanctions. “I therefore remain skeptical that the Russian regime will be willing to make any significant concessions considering the significance they attach to the issue under dispute.”

Peksen said research indicates that “issue salience” – or the amount of importance a government attaches to a certain matter – is a major determining factor in how well sanctions will work against a nation-state target. The more importance a government assigns to the issue in question, the less likely it will be to respond to any kind of international pressure, he said, noting that Putin considers Ukraine central to Russia’s national security and his country’s foreign policy.

The situation shows the dilemma that the United States and allies face in seeking ways to influence Russia without taking direct military action, which would risk a confrontation between two nuclear-armed powers. Early on in the crisis, Biden ruled out the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to Ukraine, later saying that even sending in U.S. forces to evacuate Americans could result in “world war.”

U.S. foreign policy has come to rely more heavily on sanctions in recent years. A U.S. Treasury report published in October described sanctions as “a tool of first resort to address a range of threats to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

But while sanctions can be particularly effective when targeted at a narrow issue – for example, to stop a country from developing a nuclear weapons program – they may not be powerful enough in many cases to achieve more ambitious aims.

“Sanctions have their place, and it’s obviously appropriate that they be employed at this point, because Russia has crossed a red line, but the expectation that even the most brutal economic sanctions are going to stop a great power from trying to obtain territory that its leader seems hellbent on acquiring is a fiction,” said Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Drezner said the Biden administration perhaps should have placed more emphasis on the other main threat against Putin – that an invasion of Ukraine would result in the very sorts of NATO troops and weaponry on his borders he claims to not want. While top officials in the Biden administration regularly delivered that message in public, they haven’t said what exact steps the U.S. military would take to bolster allies or add additional weaponry to NATO’s eastern flank.

The threat of sanctions can work as a tool of foreign policy, said T. Clifton Morgan, a political science professor at Rice University. Morgan said out of 1,412 cases he and his colleagues analyzed, the threat of sanctions worked to achieve a policy result about 50 percent of the time, but in the case of Putin, effectiveness depends on “what value he puts on the issues at stake.”

Previous sanctions have come at a cost to the Russian economy but appear to have done little to curb the Kremlin’s actions or threaten Putin’s rule. Top Russian officials regularly dismiss the impact of harsh economic measures against the country, displaying a confidence that Moscow can survive the punishment.

“Excuse my language, but we don’t give a (expletive) about Western sanctions,” Russia’s ambassador to Sweden, Viktor Tatarintsev, said in an interview this month with the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. He said that Russia has already faced so many sanctions, and that they have often ended up having a positive impact on the Russian economy and agricultural sector.

“We have become more self-sufficient and have been able to increase exports,” Tatarintsev said. “We do not have Italian or Swiss cheeses, but we have learned how to make the same good Russian cheeses according to Italian and Swiss recipes.”

In a recent article in the Economist, Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the hard-liners in Putin’s war cabinet are already under sanctions and would stand to benefit from a greater schism with the United States and Europe.

“If anything, further sanctions wouldn’t just fail to hurt Mr. Putin’s war cabinet, they would secure its members’ place as the top beneficiaries of Russia’s deepening economic autarky,” Gabuev wrote. “The same logic is true of domestic politics: as the country descends into a near-permanent state of siege, the security services will be the most important pillar of the regime.”

Still, even if they fail to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine, sanctions are still important for “signaling to people in Russia he is taking Russia in the wrong direction,” as well as “constraining and strangling Russia’s capacity for future aggression,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

“I think it is incumbent on the West and the United States to ensure the external environment is punishing – that we are playing our part in not facilitating and enabling this type of regime,” Kendall-Taylor said.

Kendall-Taylor said Putin’s speech seemed to indicate economic costs weren’t going to be an overriding factor in his decision-making. “If he is thinking about his legacy and doesn’t want to be the leader who lost Ukraine, I don’t think there was anything there that could deter action besides the threat of military force – and that was not in the cards,” she said.

It isn’t clear to U.S. officials what, if any, economic measures would have been strong enough to change Putin’s calculus on Ukraine, which is a personal and emotional issue for the Russian leader.

“The U.S. and NATO have worked really hard to make sure the signal is really clear – that there are going to be real sanctions and they are going to be really costly,” said Amanda Licht, a political science professor at Binghamton University who studies sanctions. “The problem is the costs just are not big enough.”

John E. Smith, a former head of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control who is now a partner at the law firm Morrison & Foerster, said economic sanctions could play a role in tempering Putin’s territorial ambitions or deterring future military adventurism.

“Will the sanctions prevent him from invading eastern Ukraine, particularly the breakaway republics? Probably not. In much the same way, the sanctions in 2014 did not mean that he turned around the troops and they left Crimea,” Smith said. “But the sanctions can have an impact in terms of just how far he’s willing to go into Ukraine. Because if you’re sitting in Kyiv, you want sanctions that will prevent him from occupying the entire territory of the country.”