The Russia Conundrum

Sanctions have been the West’s go-to response when the Kremlin transgresses yet another norm of international behaviour, but they are not a perfect solution – and the Kremlin has made a point of thumbing its nose at Western efforts. In the summer of 2015, as a riposte to Western sanctions, Russian state television showed pictures of mountains of French cheese being bulldozed into the ground in Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine. In the village of Gusino, entire legs of smuggled Spanish jamon were burned to a crisp before being thrown into a pit alongside flattened foreign tomatoes, while local officials looked on with satisfied grins usually reserved for the disposal of Class A drugs. That such wanton destruction of high-quality food failed to draw any widespread criticism in a country where pensioners struggle to make ends meet was indicative of the two-edged nature of sanctions as a tool of political pressure. The Kremlin has conditioned domestic public opinion to view Western measures as an affront to Russia’s dignity and a vindictive attack on ordinary Russians; rather than leading to outcries against their president, they tend to strengthen feelings against the West. Putin’s cheese and ham roast was his response to the Western sanctions imposed in the wake of the 2014 Ukraine and Crimea crises. The Russian agriculture minister, Alexander Tkachev, was filmed in a patriotic plea for the nation to ‘do everything in its power to ensure that consignments of [Western] food are … destroyed on the spot’. Mobile incinerators were wheeled into border towns, deployed like Katyusha rocket batteries to protect Russia from this latest foreign menace. The spectacle was intended to appeal to Russian pride, to evoke memories of past conflicts and command a spirit of national unity in the struggle against foreign foes.

The success of the Kremlin’s campaign was a warning to the West not to play into such a damaging narrative. The sanctions imposed in response to Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine are necessary, but after the end of the war and the restoration of Ukraine’s sovereignty, they too have to be carefully calibrated. In the longer term, it is not readily apparent that by making the daily life of ordinary Russians harder, we will make them more quickly realise what rogues they have for leaders. When Russians hear Western politicians speaking in the media about sanctions directed against Russia, they feel humiliated, as though they are being targeted and attacked, and this opens the door for the Kremlin’s propaganda. I want to stress how important it is to be very accurate in your language when talking about Russia. We often hear the words ‘sanctions against Russia’. This is an erroneous approach, because if we talk about the Russia of 144 million people, such broad sanctions against the country as a whole cannot change anything.

The perception of being bullied and humiliated by the West plays into the hands of those nationalists who want Russia to isolate herself from the global community. It allows the Kremlin to frame Western sanctions as punishing the Russian people, rather than the regime, a manifestation of continuing foreign attempts to undermine and contain Russian power. Unrefined sanctions simply make the Russian population look more favourably at their own government and less favourably at the West.

Putin called the wave of sanctions triggered by the invasion of Ukraine ‘a declaration of war’, while Dmitri Medvedev attempted to frame them as an attack on ‘all Russian people’. In his first ever post on Telegram, one of the few social networks still freely accessible in Russia, Medvedev called the sanctions yet more evidence of the ‘West’s frenzied Russophobia’. The West must avoid providing the Kremlin with fuel for this propaganda by making it clear that its sanctions are directed at Putin and his government cronies who launched the Ukraine war. The state machine is run by a relatively small group of people who are responsible for the bad things that are done. Behind them there are more or less two organisations: the presidential administration and the FSB. It is this system that is turning the state into what we know it as today, and it is the men and women who keep this system afloat who need to be the targets of sanctions.