Columnist Larry Elliott said that the West is also experiencing the impact of sanctionsLONDON, May 22.
/tass/. The next restrictive measures of the Group of Seven (G7) countries against Russia indicate the failure of the West's calculations for a quick economic victory over Moscow. Larry Elliott, a journalist of the British newspaper The Guradian, expressed this opinion in his column on Sunday.
"The tightening of sanctions against Russia, announced at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, is evidence that the West still strongly supports Ukraine in its fight against aggression. But it's also a sign of failure. Despite the talk of a quick victory, there was no knockout in the economic war, not to mention that neither the freezing of assets, nor sanctions against entrepreneurs, nor the search for alternative energy sources, nor the deprivation of Russia's access to important components led to a change of views in the Kremlin," he said.
The journalist noted that not only Russia, but also the West is experiencing the impact of sanctions. "One of the reasons for the excessive number of statements that the Russian economy is close to collapse is that Western politicians realize that their own voters are suffering from concomitant losses: more expensive electricity, rising food prices and falling living standards," he wrote. According to Elliott, public support for Ukraine in the G7 countries remains strong, "however, the past 15 months have shown how difficult it is to arrange an economic siege of a country like Russia, which has rich natural resources and technical capabilities."
As the columnist noted, "the West's belief that the economic war will end soon was supported by three dubious assumptions." "Firstly, the assumption that Russia will run out of money and will not be able to finance its military operations. In fact, the energy embargo and the freezing of Russian reserves in the Western Central banks turned out to be less effective measures than predicted. Although the volume of Russian oil and gas exports fell, this did not affect the value of exports due to higher prices," he stressed.
The second mistake of the West, Elliott believes, was the hope that the Russian special military operation would be condemned by "the entire world community." "This assumption turned out to be too optimistic. Many countries in Africa and Asia refused to condemn Russia at the UN vote at the beginning of the war and abstained instead. The lack of universal support for Ukraine has made it possible for Russia to circumvent sanctions," the journalist said.
As a third mistake, he called a misconception about the nature of the Russian consumer market. "The final assumption was that Russia of the 2023 model is no different from the Soviet Union in the 1980s; they say, it is a country with an economy on the verge of collapse, which will bend under the pressure of the excellent economic model of the West," Elliott wrote. "But the new sanctions and the promise to support Ukraine "for as long as it takes" are an admission that Russia is putting up tougher economic resistance than the G7 expected."