![]() ![]() Hall, the former Moscow station chief for the CIA, told me. “Sanctions, in my view, have a very spotty track record,” Steven L. Such measures also have the potential to backfire. Whatever punishment Biden and Europe come up with will have little immediate effect on Russia’s ability to execute Putin’s war. Russia has been preparing for economic isolation for years, stashing away hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cash and gold. And now he and his country will bear the consequences,” Biden said Thursday.īut if there’s one thing his speech showed, it’s that the West has precious few good options. ![]() In the U.K, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced asset freezes on 100 news Russian institutions, and said he would seize Russian oligarchs’ assets there and ban the Russian airline Aeroflot. also banned institutions from buying Russia’s sovereign debt. This was an escalation in intensity from the first round of sanctions Tuesday, when the White House had targeted two Russian banks, several oligarchs, Russian legislators who approved the invasion of Ukraine, and - in a move led by Germany - the Nord Stream II pipeline project. President Biden announced that he was sanctioning four additional banks - including VTB and Sberbank, the country’s largest - as well as stopping Russian state companies from raising debt and targeting more individuals. On Thursday, the G7 countries coordinated a series of sanctions that are designed to hamper Russian oligarchs, politicians, major companies - but which stopped short of sanctioning Vladimir Putin personally, or grinding the country’s entire economy to a halt. “These expectations make it very difficult for all individuals, actually, to stand against corruption, because it’s very costly in all different ways to resist that kind of system.Instead of an overt military response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West is attempting to weaponize its control over global financial systems to isolate Vladimir Putin’s regime. “What is different with systemic corruption is that it’s the expected behavior,” said Anna Persson, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who studies corruption. When that kind of corrupt network behavior becomes widespread, it creates its own parallel system of rewards - and punishments. You need bribe-payers and bribe-takers, resource-diverters and resource-resellers, look-the-other-wayers and demand-a-share-of-the-takers. But while that’s not exactly untrue, it misses the most important thing: namely, that corruption is a group activity. We tend to think of corruption as a failure of morality, when a greedy person decides to benefit by steering public resources toward private gain. And the second is true of Russia: It got stuck in that trap as a result of its flawed, and ultimately incomplete, transition to democracy in the 1990s. ![]() The first is true of systemic corruption wherever it occurs: It is not primarily a problem of individual immorality, but of a collective action trap. But two simple insights can help you grasp the big picture. Mapping the details of that corruption would be the work of a lifetime. And that may, one day, prove to be its undoing. The Scheherezade has gold-plated bathroom fixtures, helicopter landing pads, and a dance floor that converts into a swimming pool - the latter of which conjures the unexpected question of whether Putin is a fan of the classic film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” All of which, needless to say, would be far beyond the scope of a government salary.Īnd so the glitzy boat is a usefully concrete reminder of what Russia experts have said for years: that it is impossible to understand Putin’s regime without understanding the corruption that has by turns created, fueled, shaped, constrained it. Police seizures of massive luxury yachts in European ports have become the most visible symbol of the West’s effort to crack down on Putin and his inner circle in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.īut they are also particularly visible evidence of the Russian ruling class’s corruption. And for another, American officials say her true owner, through a haze of intermediaries, is likely to be President Vladimir V. But the Italian police’s decision to seize Scheherezade last Friday in Marina de Carrara was different.įor one thing, Scheherezade is not a person, but a 459-foot luxury superyacht. A single arrest in a Tuscan port is rarely international news. ![]()
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