Mark Galeotti

After all, Russia’s state has historically been relatively poor, inefficient in its revenue collection and perched upon an often marginal economy.

In 1782, Benjamin Franklin created a newspaper featuring a gory tale of a dastardly English plot to pay Native Americans for colonials’ scalps. He distributed the newspaper to his friends, and they forwarded it on to theirs, and before long, the gruesome story had made it into other papers. The minor detail was that this was all ‘fake news’, but who could confirm the real facts of the matter, or even wanted to?

In 1452, another pope, Nicholas V, issued Dum Diversas (‘Until Different’), a papal bull endorsing the enslavement of ‘Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers’. In 1513, this was used by Spain to claim a God-given right to seize the lands of the New World, waging bloody and terrible wars of conquest to subdue the Aztecs, Inca, Maya and other nations of South America. But these were just wars: popes and monarchs agreed.

The Confederates fought in the American Civil War in the name of ‘states’ rights’, just as the 1846–48 Mexican–American War was driven and rationalised on the basis of the US’s ‘manifest destiny’. On a very different scale, Nazis embarked on their wars of conquest claiming a right to Lebensraum, ‘living space’, and to defend the purity of the Aryan race. Every war can be framed as a just one, if left to the warriors.

When sanctions do work, the trick is often to make the objective sufficiently specific and limited that it is worth the other side complying. Otherwise, they tend at best simply to freeze a situation, preventing things from worsening, but not fixing the basic issue.

The truth seems to be that sanctions can hurt a country but rarely bring it to its knees. This is especially true of authoritarian states, which can generally absorb much more economic pain, simply by transferring it to their populations and either suppressing any consequent discontent or even using it to whip up ‘rally round the flag’ nationalism.