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21. The Ukraine War & European Security: How Durable Is America’s Strategy?

Author:
Zachary Paikin
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Abstract:
More than a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the morale of the United States and its Western allies appears high.1 Spurred into action by Moscow’s act of aggression, NATO appears more united, the EU has seemingly become more of a geopolitical actor, and Ukraine has resisted and repulsed the Russian onslaught to a degree that few initially thought possible. The Biden administration has thus far laudably managed to ramp up assistance to Kyiv without directly confronting Moscow. However, while the current U.S. policy toward Russia and Ukraine may be sustainable for some time, that does not mean it will never run out of road. Sanctions against Russia — a major global economy — have been ramped up to a level previously unseen, but they have not been effective in compelling Moscow to change course. The United States and its allies have yet to agree on what they deem to be an acceptable endgame to the war. Great power or not, Russia will remain a populous, powerful and potentially disruptive actor in Europe. Without clearly and credibly proposing policies that can lower the temperature, and without beginning to envisage what a future European security order might look like, the United States risks prolonging the conflict — with potentially unforeseeable consequences if popular war–weariness continues to grow.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, NATO, Sanctions, European Union, Strategy, Military Aid, Regional Security, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Ukraine, and United States of America

22. Economic sanctions against Russia: How effective? How durable?

Author:
Jeffrey J. Schott
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)
Abstract:
Economic sanctions by Western democracies against Russia have not stopped the war and attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Together with continued economic and military support for Ukraine, however, sanctions are blocking Russian president Vladimir Putin from achieving his territorial objectives. Sanctions have contributed to a sharp compression of Russian imports; forced Russia’s military and industry to source from more costly and inefficient suppliers at home and abroad; and slowly begun to squeeze Russian government finances. The G7 countries must sustain and augment their efforts, including by confiscating frozen reserves of the Central Bank of Russia to help fund Ukraine’s reconstruction. G7 policymakers need to derive lessons from the current crisis about the utility of sanctions in conflicts between major powers. Maintaining coherent and coordinated sanctions against large and powerful target countries is critical for the effectiveness and durability of the policy. Deploying sanctions against such rivals also requires a long-term commitment to the implementation and enforcement of the trade and finance restrictions. Sanctions impose costs on both the target country and those imposing the sanctions, so Western policymakers need to offset those costs via domestic support or tax relief to sustain political support over time for sanctions in big power conflicts.
Topic:
Sanctions, Economy, Conflict, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Ukraine, and United States of America

23. Authoritarian kleptocrats are thriving on the West’s failures. Can they be stopped?

Author:
Francis Shin and Ben Judah
Publication Date:
01-2023
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Atlantic Council
Abstract:
A hidden web of power revealed itself to Internet users in early 2022. Following a brutal government crackdown in Kazakhstan in January, anyone using open-source flight-tracking websites could watch kleptocratic elites flee the country on private jets. A little more than a month later, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought a new spectacle: social media users were able to track various oligarchs’ superyachts as they jumped from port to port to evade Western sanctions. These feeds captured a national security problem in near real time: In Eurasia and beyond, kleptocratic elites with deep ties to the West were able to move themselves and their assets freely despite a host of speeches by senior officials, sanctions, and structures designed to stop them. Kleptocratic regimes—kleptocracy means “rule by thieves”—have exploited the lax and uneven regulatory environments of the global financial system to hide their ill-gotten gains and interfere in politics abroad, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. They are aided in this task by a large cast of professional enablers within these jurisdictions. The stronger these forces get, the more they erode the principles of democracy and the rule of law. Furthermore, the international sanctions regime imposed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine has little hope of long-term success if the global financial system itself continues to weaken. The West still has a long way to go to rein in the authoritarian kleptocrats who have thrived on the institutional dysfunction, regulatory failure, and bureaucratic weakness of the transatlantic community for far too long. We need to rethink not just how we combat kleptocracy, but also how we define it. Policy makers need to understand that authoritarian regimes that threaten transatlantic security are closely linked to illicit financial systems. As it stands, our thinking about how foreign corruption spreads is too constrained by stereotypes about kleptocratic goals and actions.
Topic:
Corruption, Diplomacy, Intelligence, Politics, Sanctions, Authoritarianism, Reform, European Union, Regulation, Finance, Economy, Rule of Law, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, United Kingdom, Europe, Ukraine, Canada, and United States of America

24. Impact of economic sanctions on net commodity-producing and net commodity-consuming countries

Author:
Sergio R. Vale and Eduardo Viola
Publication Date:
01-2023
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional (RBPI)
Institution:
Instituto Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais (IBRI)
Abstract:
The war in Ukraine has had a marked economic impact. However, since Russia is a net producer of important commodities, the impact of sanctions on its economy was less than expected. But what would happen if there was a war involving a country that was a net importer of commodities? In the case of a possible China-US conflict over Taiwan, the impact on the world economy would be different, with a deeper recession around the world, but the impact on the Brazilian economy would still be positive on account of the possibility that would remain of agricultural exports to China.
Topic:
Agriculture, Economics, International Trade and Finance, Sanctions, Commodities, and Exports
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Europe, Ukraine, Taiwan, Asia, North America, and United States of America

25. To Russia with Love? The Impact of Sanctions on Regime Support

Author:
Robert Gold, Julian Hinz, and Michele Valsecchi
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW)
Abstract:
Do economic sanctions affect internal support of sanctioned countries’ governments? To answer this question, we focus on the sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 and identify their effect on voting behavior in both presidential and parliamentary elections. On the economic side, the sanctions significantly hurt Russia’s foreign trade — with regional-level variation. We use trade losses caused by the sanctions as measure for regional sanction exposure. For identification, we rely on a structural gravity model that allows us to compare observed trade flows to counterfactual flows in the absence of sanctions. Difference-in-differences estimations reveal that regime support significantly increases in response to the sanctions, at the expense of voting support of Communist parties. For the average Russian district, sanction exposure increases the vote share gained by president Putin and his party by 13 percent. Event studies and placebo estimations confirm the validity of our results.
Topic:
Globalization, International Trade and Finance, Sanctions, Economy, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia and Eurasia

26. Blowback: The Effect of Sanctions on Democratic Elections

Author:
Matthieu Crozet and Julian Hinz
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW)
Abstract:
Sanctions are meant to coerce political adversaries through economic measures. However, evidence for their effectiveness is scarce. In this paper we assess the impact of sanctions on a democracy — France — by studying the electoral consequences of the sanctions and countersanctions imposed between Russia and Western countries. Contrary to most of the existing literature we find clear evidence for exposure to the sanctions to cause an increase in the vote share for pro-Russian (and far-right) candidates during the French 2017 presidential election. Locally, the impact on voting is substantial. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that about 16,300 votes for the main far-right candidate can be directly attributed to the sanctions’ impact. This is the total number of votes cast in a medium-sized French city. It is however not nearly enough to have affected the outcome of the election at the national level.
Topic:
Globalization, International Trade and Finance, Sanctions, and Elections
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and France

27. Who is to suffer? Quantifying the impact of sanctions on German firms

Author:
Holger Görg, Anna Jacobs, and Saskia Meuchelbock
Publication Date:
05-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW)
Abstract:
In this paper, we use a novel firm level dataset for Germany to investigate the effect of sanctions on export behaviour and performance of German firms. More specifically, we study the sanctions imposed by the EU against Russia in 2014 in response to the annexation of Crimea and Russia's countermeasures. We find a substantial negative effect on both the extensive and intensive margin of German exports. While the negative effects are strongest for firms exporting products subject to trade restrictions, we provide further evidence on the indirect effects of sanctions. Analysing the impact on broader measures of firm performance, we document that the cost of sanctions is heterogeneous across firms but overall modest. Our results reveal that the negative impact of the shock was concentrated primarily among a small number of firms that were highly dependent on Russia as an export market and those directly affected by the sanctions.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Globalization, International Trade and Finance, Sanctions, Russia-Ukraine War, and Firm Dynamics
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Germany

28. How Russia Went to War: The Kremlin’s Preparations for Its Aggression Against Ukraine

Author:
Kalev Stoicescu, Mykola Nazarov, Keir Giles, and Matthew Johnson
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
International Centre for Defence and Security - ICDS
Abstract:
This report examines Russia’s preparations for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine: domestically, in Ukraine itself, in the global information domain, and in building its relationship with China. For Russia, crushing Ukraine’s quest for democracy was central to meeting its objectives of reshaping the post-Cold War order in Europe and globally, restoring its own status, and reconstituting the Russian empire and Russian world. Its preparations in the political and informational, military, and economic domains for a full-scale war in Ukraine were too extensive and overt to go unnoticed, but they were not acted upon. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the evidence went against the dominant narrative in the West and was simply brushed aside. In the political and informational domains, Russia’s domestic preparations including cementing the regime’s authority, and taking advantage of the population’s Soviet nostalgia and aspirations for the restoration of the Russian world and the empire. Limited economic preparations were intended to safeguard Russia’s economy against current and future Western sanctions, while Russia’s extensive military preparations involved large-scale defence spending and extensive military modernisation efforts. Russia’s preparations beyond its own territory included: a campaign within Ukraine to divide society and discredit the democratically elected leadership; a campaign directed at the rest of the world about Ukraine, discrediting the country and its people as an object of sympathy and support in their resistance against Russia; and a campaign of intimidation designed to instil in western leaders and populations a fear of obstructing, impeding, or offending Russia. Russia also worked to build a relationship with China. China’s support is essential to Putin’s ambitions. But equally, China’s strategy for confronting the United States – which China cannot do alone – depends on Russia remaining at least a quasi-great power.
Topic:
Security, NATO, Development, Sanctions, Military Affairs, European Union, Resilience, and Information Warfare
Political Geography:
Russia, China, United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, and United States of America

29. The Wagner Group’s Expanding Global Footprint

Author:
Raphael Parens, Colin P. Clarke, Christopher Faulkner, and Kendal Wolf
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
Abstract:
1. The sanctions discussion needs to be expanded, as such designations should aim to shame Wagner’s state partners. 2. Sanctions lists should expand to include actors in third-party countries, such as Broker Expert LLC, a Russian-owned company widely reported to be shipping heavy machinery to support Wagner Group forestry activities in CAR, and First Industrial Company, a business owned by Wagner operator Dimitri Sytyi which concocts cheap “Russian” alcohol in Cameroon and sells it in CAR. 3. Perhaps one of the more important lessons for countering Wagner and other Russian PMCs is the importance of multilateralism. 4. NATO must also continue to consider proactive tools to counter Russian and other PMCs. 5. NATO should work to amplify efforts to push the adoption of the 2008 Montreux Document—an international agreement designed to reaffirm the legal obligations of states where PMCs originate and for those who hire them. 6. The Wagner Group and other Russian PMCs require consideration within a larger great power discussion, particularly as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has firmly aligned Europe and the US against Russia. 7. US senior leaders should demonstrate a greater diplomatic commitment to African allies and put pressure on other African leaders considering, or currently contracting, the Wagner Group and other Russian PMC operations. 8. International bodies such as the African Union, ECOWAS, and the East African Community (EAC) should reevaluate their approaches to peacekeeping and instability. 9. Exploiting the friction between Wagner’s financier and the MoD should also be considered a worthwhile policy option. 10. Last, NATO members must formalize methods of blocking contact with the Wagner Group through their international activities.
Topic:
NATO, Sanctions, Wagner Group, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

30. Russia’s War in Ukraine: Critical Vulnerabilities to Russia’s Military Operations and Systems

Author:
Rob Lee and Philip Wasielewski
Publication Date:
06-2023
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
Abstract:
Some of the critical vulnerabilities to Russia’s military operations and systems—revealed during the war in Ukraine—are due to its military culture and poor strategic choices at the beginning of the war including overly ambitious strategic aims. Deficiencies in Russian military culture include a highly centralized decision-making process, a disregard for the welfare of its soldiers, and flagrant dishonesty. Certain aspects of Russia’s military culture, especially the disconnect between front-line soldiers and senior officers, complicate the Russian military’s ability to adapt, develop solutions to obvious deficiencies, and institutionalize lessons learned from the battlefield. Other critical Russian military vulnerabilities are not inherent to its military culture but to Russia’s national demographic and industrial capabilities. Limits in these areas make it difficult for Russia to regenerate military power by either increasing the size of its military or increasing the quality of its weapons systems. Even if Russia’s military culture experiences a post-war military renaissance, its ability to regenerate military power lost in Ukraine will be limited by its declining population and industrial bases as well as Western sanctions on high technology.
Topic:
Sanctions, Armed Forces, Military Affairs, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, and Ukraine