As Sanctions Fail And Russia Advances, The Collective West's Failure To Break Russia Is Apparent

As sanctions fail and Russia advances, Western media changes its tune on Ukraine

RT

Even as the collective West continues to insist – against all observable reality – that the conflict in Ukraine is going well for Kiev, major media outlets are becoming increasingly uneasy with the situation on the economic front. More and more observers are admitting that the embargoes imposed by the US and its allies aren’t crushing the Russian economy, as originally intended, but rather their own.

 

Meanwhile, major publications have begun to report on the actual situation on the frontlines, rather than uncritically quoting myths like the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ or ‘Snake Island 13’ propagated by Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, as they did early on. There have even been hints, however timid, that the West should perhaps stop unconditionally supporting Kiev and promote a negotiated peace instead. 

“Russia is winning the economic war,” the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott declared on Thursday. “It is now three months since the west launched its economic war against Russia, and it is not going according to plan. On the contrary, things are going very badly indeed,” he wrote.

Elliott actually argues that the recent US announcement of sending rocket launchers to Ukraine is proof that sanctions are not working: “The hope is that modern military technology from the US will achieve what energy bans and the seizure of Russian assets have so far failed to do: force [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to withdraw his troops.”

In a May 30 essay, Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins also said that the embargo had failed to force a Russian withdrawal, but argued the EU should “stick to helping Ukraine’s war effort”instead, while withdrawing the sanctions because they are “self-defeating and senselessly cruel.”

As Jenkins points out, the sanctions have actually raised the price of Russian exports such as oil and grain – thus enriching, rather than impoverishing, Moscow while leaving Europeans short of gas and Africans running out of food. 

The collective West’s failure to break Russia was apparent even to The Economist, not exactly a publication sympathetic to Moscow. The newspaper reluctantly admitted a month ago that the Russian economy had bounced back from the initial sanctions shock. Meanwhile, it’s the West that has to deal with energy shortages, spiraling costs of living, and record inflation. It’s Americans, not Russians, who can’t find baby formula in stores and can’t afford gas.

Perhaps that’s why this “spring of discontent” with the Western sanctions policy hasn’t been confined to the European side of the Atlantic. On Tuesday, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Christopher Caldwell in which he criticized the Biden administration for “closing off avenues of negotiation and working to intensify the war” by sending more and more weapons to Kiev.

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