CountVonTroll

CountVonTroll t1_ja278d0 wrote

> Might matter a bit on the margins, but probably won’t make a huge difference. Seems like the expert consensus is that the overall sanctions regime has been a bit of a dud.

Incidentally, I happen to still have an interview about this open in another tab, with the professor whose group maintains Yale's well known list of companies that are still doing business in Russia or have pulled out.

The IMF and Worldbank figures for Russian GDP and their forecast make it look as if the sanctions weren't having much of an effect. However, these figures are based on the data that Russia/Rosstat, as a member of those institutions, gives them. Since after the sanctions had been introduced, Rosstat has stopped submission of the normally required detailed data. So IMF and Worldbank can't run their own numbers, and have no choice but to rely on whatever Rosstat (read: Putin) tells them it's going to be.

The point is, we don't have the data to know how Russia's economy is actually holding up. Only indirect and anecdotal evidence suggesting the sanctions do work on the one hand, and on the other, we have Putin's word that the Russian economy is doing just fine.

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