Britain’s economic war against Vladimir Putin is a mess – and it may be pointless
Boris Johnson is getting serious about Ukraine. He may not admit many Ukrainian refugees lest they endanger the Conservatives’ claim to being the party of low migration. But he is slamming sanctions on seven more London oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich, Igor Sechin and Oleg Deripaska. The high-profile trio, with four other oligarchs, are eerily accused of “enabling the killing of civilians, destruction of hospitals and illegal occupation of sovereign allies”. Abramovich’s Chelsea football club is to be “frozen” and banned from selling tickets. That should teach Chelsea fans a lesson about who to support, and is meant to make Vladimir Putin shake in his shoes.
War is simple. You fight. You kill. You win or you lose. Economic war, on the other hand, is a mess of signals, boycotts, ill-defined targets and indiscriminate victims. Because it is bloodless, it is somehow detached from whatever issue is at hand. Almost invariably the real sufferers are the poor and impotent. As for Abramovich, what is he supposed to do? The likelihood of his going to Moscow and persuading his chum that the invasion of Ukraine was a terrible mistake must be zero. This is foreign policy as pure theatre.
Ukraine has summoned the west to collective action. The current surge in sanctions has generated a hysteria of Russia-hating gestures by western countries. This has clearly been aimed at relieving their justified reluctance to join or widen the Ukrainian war. The unity of the damnation has been impressive, even if the effectiveness has not. For all the shared condemnation, two weeks of truly colossal financial and commercial disruption have yet to deliver the slightest shift in Putin’s strategy; indeed, sanctions may have even hardened his
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