Co-author of Ilona Sologub at VoxUkraine
Russian aggression in Ukraine is a war crime that is fully displayed in real time. Viewers can watch live Russian forces indiscriminately bombing residential areas and critical infrastructure, bombing a nuclear power plant and killing innocent civilians trying to flee the war. Anyone who cares about humanity is outraged by this aggression. But not the people of Russia. At least not most of them.
Polls and anecdotal evidence suggest that Putin continues to find strong support among Russian citizens. The brave people protesting in Moscow and other cities are too few in number to make a difference.
After years of hateful propaganda, many people in Russia truly believe that Ukraine is run by the Nazis and that the Russian government is conducting a “military operation” in Ukraine to calm them down.
Because no country is interested in hiring Russia militarily and Ukraine has no plans to invade Russia, only the Russians can stop this war of aggression. Putin is certainly not interested. A coup by Russian elites, co-opted into Putin’s regime, is an illusion.
Therefore, there must be a mass movement motivated enough to stop the war. What would help them to understand that war is wrong, or at least that war is not worth it?
Obviously, the bodies of dead Russian soldiers that are returned to their families will begin to be recorded in the Russian public. Just as the Soviet Union’s human losses in Afghanistan have made the regime very unpopular, Russia’s losses in Ukraine will erode support for the war. But this can take years of tragic deaths before the war comes on the threshold of enough people in Russia. Clearly, the message should be delivered faster.
Financial and economic sanctions against Russia may help to convey this message. Indeed, they have already begun to cause some pain to the Russian economy. The ruble is in free fall. The banking sector is under stress. Trade links and supply chains are severed. This creates a dissonance between propaganda (“Russia wins”) and reality (shortages of goods, inflation, job losses). Many Russians will begin to understand that something is wrong, but Russia has not yet stopped the war, and therefore the sanctions must be tightened even further.
The next obvious step is to stop Russian oil and gas exports. This step will severely limit the Russian government’s ability to finance its war of aggression. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced that Russian energy is not on the table yet. This is morally wrong and it is up to Germany’s allies to convince them of the importance of this key step.
However, even if the civilized world does not want to do the obvious, there are many other tools to increase the cost of war for Russia. For example, Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons to kill civilians, was allowed to sell Iraqi oil, but his regime could only use oil revenues to buy humanitarian goods (food, medical supplies, etc.).
Gazprom may have been denied control of gas pipelines and storage facilities in the EU to avoid the artificial shortage they created as a result of the Russian invasion. Gazprom and Russian oil companies should not have direct or indirect access to international capital markets so that they are not “money cows” for the Russian government. Payments for Russian oil and energy could also be delayed to reduce the liquidity available to the Russian government.
In addition, the civilized world has not exhausted other tools to limit the Russian government’s ability to wage war of aggression against Ukraine. Several Russian banks may be excluded from international financial markets. By refusing to serve aircraft, Boeing and Airbus actually have a large part of the Russian fleet on the ground. Software vendors can similarly short-circuit many modern forms of business. For example, if major cloud service providers leave the Russian market, many Russian companies will find their operations disrupted. Because Russia is so integrated into the global economy, the vulnerabilities are endless.
Where does that stop? It stops when Russia stops the war in Ukraine, when Ukrainian cities are not bombed, when innocent Ukrainians are not killed, when Russian forces withdraw from Ukraine.
It will work? The Soviet Union collapsed because it was unable to provide its citizens with basic goods and services. If the Soviet repressive machine could not cope with the riots and dissent, Putin’s repressive machine would not be able to