JRL NEWSWATCH: “Russia Thinks America Is Bluffing” – Foreign Affairs
“To Deter a Ukraine Invasion, Washington’s Threats Need to Be Tougher.”
“… [T]he West’s threat of economic sanctions can work only if … proposed measures would make Russian military action against Ukraine expensive enough to alter the Kremlin’s cost-benefit calculus. Putin, however, sees Ukraine as crucial to Russia’s great-power status and to his own personal legacy. … [F]or sanctions to work, they have to be costlier than the vast benefit Putin perceives in controlling Ukraine. That doesn’t appear to be in the offing …. [T]ough financial sanctions on Russia could well be the largest use of sanctions since the United States targeted Japanese finance and oil imports before World War II. This is why Russia may think the United States is bluffing …. The Kremlin believes it has a far higher tolerance for risk than its American or European counterparts. … The [U.S.] administration should name … Russian banks it would blacklist … specific transactions it would prohibit, and … companies that would be in danger of going under. Then the Kremlin might start taking its sanctions threats more seriously. …”