Conventionally, sanctions have targeted entire economies to penalize them for deviant behavior. In the case of Russia, a targeted approach has been taken against its oligarchs that is tied to a broader torrent of deplorable forces liberal nations should reckon with rather intensify.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Aside from funneling weapons into Ukraine to arm an open-ended insurgency to destroy the country and undermine Russia's attempt to consolidate control over it, the West's main method of retaliation for Russia's military operations have been sanctions and asset seizures. On the surface, it seems like a peaceful, legitimate response: a way to cut adversaries or enemies off from opposing countries' economies so that their economies aren't complicit in actions they don't support. One could also say, it has the broader moral legitimacy of boycotting for political protection of values these countries espouse that adversaries actions more broadly challenge. In the context of Ukraine, this means defending Western liberal democracy and 'freedom' from the authoritarian oligarchy of Russia and its despotic leader, Vladimir Putin.

To this end, there is basically universal support for these economic sanctions and asset seizures: from the EU to the U.S; from conservatives to liberals, Republicans to Democrats, to Progressives. The debate is essentially over how to close loopholes, how severe they should be, why aren't we imposing more sanctions on more Russian oligarchs, extending these sanctions to other oil producers whose governments or cultures we also disagree with so we don't seem morally hypocritical.

For every missile we don't launch in defense of Ukraine, or fighter-jet we don't transfer to risk WWIII, and for every no-fly zone we don't impose, a new 'round' of sanctions comes. Shouting moral condemnations as we cut-off Russian banks, seize oligarch's European vacations homes and private yachts, ban the import of their oil, boycott their restaurants, writers, movies, plays, music, ballet; tweeting with glee as Western companies like Apple ban Russians from their App Store, Western brands like McDonalds voluntarily shut down operations in the country, clothing-stores, newspapers, credit card companies, software developers, consultancy firms—there is no doubt that overwhelming majorities of citizens of Western liberal democracies see in these actions an expression of their own deeply felt convictions.

Analyzing the Morality of the EU Sanctions

Reading the text of the EU sanctions^{1 2 3 4 5} is to encounter a thought process that expresses a complete disavowal of Russian political autonomy. They essentially say that every action undertaken by Russia and by Russian-aligned elected officials in Crimea and within Russia are incapable of independent action; instead, these officials act 'in concert' and 'out of loyalty' to their authoritarian leader, Vladmimir Putin (the sanctions repeat this claim ad nauseam, and each entry in the sanctions Annex includes an introductory story highlighting the targeted oligarch's personal connections to Putin). The referendum of Crimeans to secede from Ukraine and become part of the Russian Federation is not the collective actualization of a people under the UN Charter to reject a political and sociological context within Ukraine an overwhelming majority of the Crimean population (97%) feels no longer represents them; rather, it is only the result of a 'sham' election resulting from 'Soviet' elites' corrupt machinations to which the population is unwillingly forced to submit. It is in this same sense that targeting specific actors within Russia for its military campaign in Ukraine finds its legitimization: it isn't the Russian population who wants this war, it is rather only they who suffer at the hands of the unaccountable elites who have drawn them into a war for economic and political calculations oligarchs have made for their own enrichment.

These sanctions, as such, separate the citizenry of Crimea and of Russia from the political decisions of their leadership and, by doing so, assert their own higher legitimacy over these populations. It is to the Ukraine and, thus, to the EU that Crimean aspirations and 'dreams' actually align; and it is simply against Putin and his kleptocracy that the Russian and Ukrainian dream of being liberated. The role of Western sanctions is, thus, to break the stranglehold this oligarchy has on their populations to assist them in accomplishing this goal.

Nowhere in these sanctions is this more clear than in those that target journalists and elite media figures who have expressed their support for Russia's foreign policies with respect to Crimea and Ukraine. Consider the EU Council Decision 2022/337 Annex entry on Alisher Usmanov, that refers to him as 'one of Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs', who 'fronted' for Putin and 'solved his business problems' and who 'took control of business daily Kommersant' which then committed the crime of publishing 'a propaganda anti-Ukrainian article by Dmitri Medvedev' saying it is 'meaningless to engage in talks with the current Ukrainian government, who in his opinion were under direct foreign control'. Or that of Andrey Turchak, secretary of the General Council of United Russia party, whose father 'trained judo with Vladimir Putin', and who committed the crimes of promoting 'a positive attitude' to the recognition of the Donbas Republics, 'publicly state[ing] that it was impossible to solve the Donbas conflict in a peaceful manner', and for expressing 'unfounded claims about a planned Ukrainian military offensive in the Donbas'. Or Tigran Keosayan, a 'film director and journalist who has spread anti-Ukrainian propaganda in the Russian media', who 'consistently portrayed Ukraine as a weak and corrupt country, which had been maintained solely thanks to Western help', who 'suggested' Ukrainian authorities 'were not legitimate', 'publicly accused Ukraine of escalating the conflict', and whose documentary “The Crimean Bridge, Made With Love”, 'glorified' the Crimean bridge' and was 'reportedly' made as a gift to Putin. Or Olga Skabeyeva, a 'journalist of the state-owned TV station Rossiya-1' who hosts 'the most popular talk-show in Russia, “60-Minutes”, where she has spread anti-Ukraine propaganda', also committed the crime of promoting a 'positive attitude' to the annexation of Crimea, 'portrayed the situation in Ukraine in a biased manner, depicting the country as an artificial state, sustained both financially and militarily by the West' and thus a 'Western satellite in NATOs hands', 'diminishing Ukraine's role to a “modern anti-Russia”, and who, even worse, also 'appears conscious of her cynical role in the Russian propaganda machine'. Or, finally, consider the Annex entry of Roman Babayan, 'a journalist and member of the Moscow City Douma' that hosts the show “Own Truth”, who 'spread anti-Ukrainian propaganda' and 'promoted a positive attitude' to the 'actions of separatists in Donbas', who 'clearly stated' that 'every inhabitant of Donbas would prefer the region to join Russia', 'accused Ukrainian authorities of nationality-based persecutions in the Donbas and a de facto genocide', who said Ukrainians had 'killed woman and children', and who supported the Russian 'narrative' about the “fascist regime” in Ukraine by 'providing an indistinct recording with soldiers bearing the Nazi German naval ensign, describing them as Ukrainians'.

The crimes here are essentially thought crimes against Western hegemony to the extent that one takes them at face value⁵. It is only by believing every one of these people acted 'cynically' in pursuit of enrichment at the expense of ordinary Russian citizens (as Olga Skabeyeva is baselessly accused of doing) that these sanctions can maintain the veneer of Western moral authority. The implication is that Western elites' vision for Russian, Ukrainian, and Crimean society is somehow more naturally aligned with their actual aspirations, rather than those that they profess in their own country or make known at the ballot box. EU sanctions, as such, do little more than document the prevailing sentiment in the liberal West: that their values are more enlightened, more consistent with innate human nature than those of other nations, whose citizens are only imprisoned within the confines of artificial borders that conceal a more fundamental human solidarity and aspiration for freedom that the West is responsible for liberating. And their proclamations on these topics seemingly have the force of binding International Law (which is part of the delusion in which Western liberals persist).

It is in this final sense that the ostensible morality of targeting oligarchs to spare to the citizenry of Russia is exposed as a fraud. Because everyday that Russia's military campaign is not brought to a halt by these sanctions, and everyday that the streets of Moscow aren't yet filled with 'courageous' protesters willing to risk arrest to protest their government, is reason for another round of sanctions. The Russian economy is 'hurting' we are told; 'all-out economic Western 'economic warfare' is the best way to stop Putin; 'economic war' against Russia is 'part of an international campaign to damage Russia's economy'. Only one more, broader 'round' of sanctions is necessary to finally precipitate this, the actually desired (as expected) result of sanctions. It is only China that is preventing this now, so perhaps they need to be sanctioned as well. Or the UAE and Saudi Arabia won't take Biden's calls to pump more oil: sanction them as well⁶. There is no morality to these economic sanctions: their purpose is what they always are: to destroy the target economies destabilize them and to force their populations out onto the streets to effect regime-change. Targeting oligarchs is only a way of convincing enlightened liberal citizens to conflate the actual purpose of these sanctions with a moral cause (of fighting economic inequality and crony capitalism) as well as a way of leaving the most important aspects of the global liberal economic order essentially untouched (Russia's oil and gas). And while this might be construed as a concession to reality, it is actually indicative of the fundamental logic of a globalized liberalism: to conceal actually-significant economic policy debates under the veneer of a phony moral crusade.

In this way, Western countries' focus on the economic and political oligarchy in Russia in their sanctions policy seems rather like only a foil through which they cynically justify their own agenda towards Ukraine and towards Russia (and that of their entire global liberal economy) that has the convenient benefit of deflecting from their own failings.

On the Spirit of the Sanctions

The inability to concede anything to Russia's own narrative about the situation that is reflected in these sanctions, however, reflects a deeper problem currently facing Western liberal democracies who, in other circumstances, might be seen as simply honest-but-ignorant actors otherwise deserving of trust that they are in fact willing to adapt their approach to more closely fit reality to avoid conflict. The reality of the present is that they are today hostage to forces far beyond the control of any single individual.

In society at large, the seizing the personal assets of Russian oligarchs isn't connected to any kind of elaborate political understanding of how specific individuals are implicated in the production of an oligarchic foreign policy that can only be opposed by sanctioning specific actors; nor is the act of sanctioning oligarchs rather than the population part of any self-conscious moral rationale. Rather, it is blanket opposition to an evil and malevolent tyrant (Putin) who leads a malevolent and corrupt cabal, against which Western citizens conflate asset seizures, corporate boycotts, and cultural censorship as part of a global fight for economic justice rather than an unjustifiable intervention in the domestic affairs of a foreign country and the pseudo-legal confiscation of personal property whose legitimacy derives from sanctions that are themselves indefensibly expressed. As such, citizens of Western countries who have been isolated (by design) from the actual rationale of Russia's military operation in Ukraine (and that the sanctions themselves are an effort to obfuscate) see in it only an opportunity to express their own self-professed 'progressive' economic, anti-war morality—only this time it serendipitously finds itself aligned with the full economic and military weight of the state.

And so, just as the liberal clique does in the micro social, it attempts to carry-out at the macro global: banning Russian media to balkanize their virtue from corruption, stealing the property of others whose ownership right was never actually theirs but just a temporary lease from the government predicated on compliance and good behavior, and fomenting an endless passive-aggressive anti-war Javelin-fueled insurgency to destroy all of Ukraine while goading for WWIII and total nuclear annihilation in defense of their 'principles' so that eventually Russia (and the world) will be forced to confront the liberal paradox: that its dishonest peace somehow seems preferable to its endless insurgency against the truth.

And all this at the same time that they applaud their own virtuous oligarchs: Elon Musk donates his Starlink systems to Zelensky so he can continue broadcasting from the basement of the U.S. embassy in Poland if he needs to; the CEOs of every major brand shutting down business in Russia and banning Russia from using their services and products; every major media organization in the West is nonstop war propaganda 'standing with Ukraine', flooding the senses with morality-pandering directed straight to the medulla. This type of targeted sanctions policy is tailor-made for a certain type of thoughtless, historically ignorant, social-media-pervaded society of moral crusaders one can only find in the liberal West. It is as if Western liberals had channeled their entire personality into these sanctions and, through them, the whole of liberal society expresses its true spirit. These sanctions don't read like a cynical plot; rather, they personify the innate passive aggressivity of those willing to lie and disavow truth to retaliate for any perceived violation of the sanctity of their personal career-track (here, the career of the entire corporate, liberal West) and whatever fabrications they've deemed necessary to support it, to the bitter end.

In Conclusion

The EU sanctions regime against Russia is a written testament to the current social-media enabled hysteria of Western liberals. The sanctions themselves express complete disavowal of any and all Russian rationales for their position against NATO membership for Ukraine and their demands that Ukraine remain a neutral country: without American biological labs, without NATO training compounds, without piles of American and European weapons throughout its territory. Indeed, these demands are so destabilizing to the narrative the West has created around Ukraine that they can scarcely even be mentioned (and if they are, it is because Russia is unwilling to make peace and agree to Ukraine's terms of surrender). In much the same way, citizens of Western liberal democracies are themselves cut-off from the truth of the conflict and any real comprehension of Russian demands, they also find their own raison d'etre in the crusade that is the underlying moral legitimacy of the sanctions themselves. They see in the panoply of cynically designed Russian sanctions the consummation of the progressive political state they have been agitating for. The dysfunction and oligarchic corporate foundation of their own countries is temporarily ignored to focus on a more important threat conveniently (again, just like COVID) facing humanity. By refusing to see Russia's demands as anything other than a caricature of evil, they become subsumed by a phony moral crusade and conflate everything for something it isn't. The moral indignation of 'stand with Ukraine' against Russia and its authoritarian oligarchs is all about strengthening the power of Western corporate elites (who they now deludedly cheer), that find in this conflict their own potential to insist on a world-order that is facing an existential threat to its survival and that, under any other less hysterical conditions, most would still see it for what it is, and be capable of opposing it⁷.

Footnotes