DO SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA WORK? A REPORT FROM THE NATURAL EXPERIMENT AND LESSONS FOR ISRAEL AND ISRAEL’S DETRACTORS

Do Western sanctions against Russia work? Such was the question asked by the ‘Economist’ recently. Those sanctions, yes, ‘like none the world has seen’. Well, how does one know that something works, in principle?  In scientific fields, it is rather rigidly understood: something ‘works’ when it achieves the hoped result, and the result is confirmed by comparing the ‘before-policy’ situation to ‘after-policy situation’, and possible alternative explanations that could have generated the result are ruled out definitively. The comparison, in scientific fields, should be based on numerical indicators, not feelings. Presumably, Western sanctions were imposed to end the war against Ukraine. And, presumably, the causal mechanism, if it was ever specified by those who conceived the sanctions, would look something like this: sanctions will be imposed, prices would go up, hopefully scarcity would develop too, Russian population will suffer, it will then turn against Putin and depose him. That will end the war.

Has it happened and, if not, how close are we to this scenario? I will leave the economic analyses to those who are in a better position than myself to conduct them (and to convince you about their validity!). I will tell you something about the Russian public opinion, and I will be basing my report on two sources. The first is VCIOM  – Russian Pubic Opinion Research center which is a state-sponsored and highly professional establishment. If ‘state-sponsored’ and ‘highly professional’ sound like a contradiction of terms to some-I can live with this, politely disagreeing. My stress on the ‘state -sponsoredness’ of VCIOM in a gesture made in the name of transparency, as a gift to my critics who may maintain that VCIOM’s data may have been doctored somehow. The answer is that they have not been or, at least, not to the extent that affected the essential truth. What makes me so sure is the existence of the second source. The second source is the dissident Levada Center whose self-description in the English (curiously, not the Russian) section of their website includes the following: ‘In 2016, the Russian Ministry of Justice placed the Levada Center on the register of NGOs performing the functions of foreign agents.’ So, here goes it: dishes from the state and the anti-state kitchens are served to you at this banquet, dear reader….

Let us start from the data from VCIOM. Six indicators are in front of you, but really, just one would suffice. Multiple indicators simply amplify the message. And the message is: almost half a year into the war and sanctions, the Russian public is feeling positive about its leadership and its political and economic policies, the public is optimistic about the future of the country, generally happy with the economic realities and reluctant to partake in protests. Not much nuance is here really. Further, all mentioned indices went up around March 2022, shortly after the war started, and they remain unchanged ever since. Specifically, trust in Vladimir Putin was high already before the war. Obama, Trump and Biden, all of them together and each of them separately, could only dream of these levels of popular support. Russians’ trust in Putin shot up sharply in March 2022 (Fig 1, Panel A). At the same time, satisfaction with personal life went up too (Fig 1, Panel D). How is this possible? What can political realities do to that thing – presumably marriages, divorces, children etc.? They can and they do: what we witness, very likely, is general increase in optimism that drives up satisfaction in strictly personal domains too. The summary of the situation is that in March 2022 Russian population experienced a lift of heart of some sort. It did not dissipate. The lift of heart is still there, six months and so many sanctions later.

Let us see now what the dissident Levada Center can tell us. Pretty much the same picture. One advantage of Levada data is that it traces some trajectories long into the past. The approval of Putin, by way of example, can be traced to year 2000. That adds another insight or two. Putin’s popularity was science-fictionally high at all times but it had its ups and downs. The peaks of Putin’s popularity are now and also following the annexation of Crimea, in 2014. Sharp rise in approval of Putin’s figure, as well as in approval of the State Parliament (Duma) and the local authorities took place precisely in March 2022, and the new extraordinarily high levels of approval persisted since then. (Fig 2, Panels A and B). It is interesting to see the increase in popularity of the local authorities. Theoretically, it is not totally clear just how this is related to war, yet again-if one invokes the hypothesis of the generally heightened positivity that starts with the foreign policy and spills into other areas – this finding makes sense.

Levada data also tells an incredible story of the development of a new ‘Cold War’ in the Russian mind. Unfavourable views of the USA and the European Union were unambiguously a minority view (mostly under 20%)  until the Crimean campaign. This was a watershed event , especially with respect to the EU: it is only around 2014 that anti-American and anti-European majorities formed in Russia. This sentiment showed signs of decline pre-2022 and then resumed and peaked at a very high level in response to Western position on war in Ukraine. (Fig 2, Panels C and D).

It is now time to go back to Western sanctions…There is not much room for experiments in social sciences outside of psychology. And even in that field, scientists face many constrains. The chief one is the moral nature of an experiment. The best way to determine what conditions make people commit crime, for example, is to allow them to commit crime freely, modify conditions and see how different outcomes arise from different conditions. Yet, this is an impossible ask – experiments of this kind are deemed immoral, no matter how potentially useful they may be. Consequently, such experiments are ‘unconductable’ under the current regulations that rule the scientific fields. ‘Natural experiments’ are a godsend. These are developments that occur naturally, independently, in a way unplanned and unaffected by researchers. They can be immoral in a sense that wars are, hence their value for science. They show how the reality looks under conditions that cannot be re-created in a ‘lab’. Russia-Ukraine war and the Western response to it in the form of sanctions is such natural experiment, unfolding live. What we have so far following the enactment of sanctions is heightened trust in authority, an increase in optimism and a transition from largely pro-Western to anti-Western outlook. All that is not exactly momentous either.

On international arena, Russia is not the only player to attract sanctions. Iran has been affected by sanctions for a while, and Israel has been exposed to some boycotts and threats of boycotts and sanctions for as long as it existed. The reasoning against sanctions is that they may have the opposite effect from the one that the imposers hope to achieve. They encourage cohesiveness, social mobilization, sense of threat in the targeted body. Sanctions also may fail due to their own half-hearted nature or due to the unexpected and unpredictable reactions of those placed under sanctions. I am not in a position to comment on the exact mechanism of ‘how sanctions work’. All I know is that, judging by the Russian public opinion, whatever policies were attempted by the West, they left us with an emboldened leader and a euphoric-looking population. Those who side with sanctions in other contexts, be it Iran or Israel, should take notice. So far sanctions look like ‘lazy parenting’, at best. At worst, they look like a show of virtue signaling enacted by a bunch of Foreign Office wanna-be stars of international diplomacy with distinct dislike of evidence-based style of thinking.