It’s both, Russia did make its economy more resilient to sanctions, but ultimately it is not an industrial nation but one of resource colony.
Make no mistake, Russia is food and energy self-sufficient, it will survive even in the harshest sanctions, but it would still be very painful for the transition because it lacks many industries. It would have taken years to rebuild the Soviet era industrial supply chain if they were really cut off access to imports from the rest of the world.
Russia got lucky that China and the rest of the world didn’t join the Europeans in sanctioning them. One factor could be that the US overplayed its hands, by seizing all of Russia’s foreign reserves ($300 billion) and cutting off SWIFT access actually had the unintended detrimental consequences as it scared the other countries into thinking that they better find ways to get out of the US dollar regime in one way or another, or this too would be their fate one day if the US isn’t happy with them.
or this too would be their fate one day if the US isn’t happy with them
They already knew this, since this behavior from the US is hardly new. Just look at Cuba, Iraq, Iran, DPRK, etc. Although I guess the difference here is scale, since if you sanction Iran or Cuba that’s not going to affect most of the world’s nations, so it’s relatively easy to ignore.
It’s both, Russia did make its economy more resilient to sanctions, but ultimately it is not an industrial nation but one of resource colony.
Make no mistake, Russia is food and energy self-sufficient, it will survive even in the harshest sanctions, but it would still be very painful for the transition because it lacks many industries. It would have taken years to rebuild the Soviet era industrial supply chain if they were really cut off access to imports from the rest of the world.
Russia got lucky that China and the rest of the world didn’t join the Europeans in sanctioning them. One factor could be that the US overplayed its hands, by seizing all of Russia’s foreign reserves ($300 billion) and cutting off SWIFT access actually had the unintended detrimental consequences as it scared the other countries into thinking that they better find ways to get out of the US dollar regime in one way or another, or this too would be their fate one day if the US isn’t happy with them.
They already knew this, since this behavior from the US is hardly new. Just look at Cuba, Iraq, Iran, DPRK, etc. Although I guess the difference here is scale, since if you sanction Iran or Cuba that’s not going to affect most of the world’s nations, so it’s relatively easy to ignore.