Sanctions and the Russian adjustment
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Asked whether Vladimir Putin was losing any sleep over the prospect of further American sanctions, John Kiriakou answered that the leverage had already been spent, and dated the moment it ran out.

The buyers

His first answer was commercial. Putin was not worried, Kiriakou said, "because the Indians and the Chinese have said whatever oil you have we'll buy it." A commodity with more than one willing purchaser cannot be embargoed by one of them.

The three or four weeks

Kiriakou then described an initial period in which the measures did bite. He attributed the admission to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who he says stated after the invasion of Ukraine "that the Russians were surprised at the quickness with which the US was able to impose sanctions."

The effect, in Kiriakou's telling, was real but brief: "we kind of knocked them off kilter for three or four weeks." What ended it was not a countermeasure but a realisation, that Russia "[doesn't] really need the United States, including the American banking system," once it could turn to India, China "and everybody else in the world that doesn't want to fall into line behind US sanctions." After that, he said, the Russians found they were "actually not having too tough of a problem with it."

The detail about the banking system matters to the argument. Exclusion from dollar clearing is the sanction that is normally assumed to be inescapable, and Kiriakou's claim is that it turned out to be escapable within a month.

The currency question

Kiriakou went further than the immediate case. "Just wait until the BRICS countries make their own unified currency," he said. "It's going to be a major change in global" affairs. When Ted Rall called such a currency an atomic bomb capable of tipping the United States into a depression within days, Kiriakou agreed twice: "That's right. It really could."

The conclusion

His summary was categorical. The Russians "are not afraid of sanctions. We can sanction them from now until kingdom come. They don't care about the sanctions because they don't need us." Rall reduced this to "it's really as simple as that," and Kiriakou let it stand.

He paired the assessment with a reading of the war itself, that Russia was under no pressure to settle, and that any deal would therefore require "something really special in it for the Russians." An end to sanctions, he agreed, would be a start.

See also

- Sergey Lavrov
- Ukraine as a proxy war
- The Costa Rica model
- Ted Rall
