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For almost three years, the U.S. and its allies have slapped roughly 5,000 sanctions and export controls on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. This has targeted everything from energy to oligarchs to access to global trade. But the war continues. NPR international affairs correspondent Jackie Northam looks at how effective the sanctions have been.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: Late last week, the Biden administration announced a new and expansive round of sanctions on Russia. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said they were aimed at Russia's largest sources of revenue.
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JOHN KIRBY: These sanctions target both Russian oil and LNG, and we expect our actions to cost Russia upwards of billions of dollars per month.
NORTHAM: This latest round of sanctions, in the final days of the Biden administration, included two major Russian oil producers, liquefied natural gas projects, oil traders and technicians, and nearly 200 tankers. Like the many other rounds of sanctions over the past three years, they're meant to make it difficult for Moscow to finance the war in Ukraine.
KIMBERLY DONOVAN: I think that the sanctions that have been placed on Russia have had effects. I don't think that they've necessarily achieved the goals of the sanctions.
NORTHAM: Kimberly Donovan is director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which charts the efficacy of sanctions. She says sanctions have not brought the Kremlin to its knees.
DONOVAN: They were able to develop a lot of workarounds to evade those sanctions. So they've just had, you know, some time to really hone their kind of money laundering and sanctions evasion techniques.
NORTHAM: Some neighboring countries have allowed Western technology and consumer goods to cross their borders into Russia, and the Kremlin has found voracious new markets for their oil - China and India - that paid rock-bottom prices for crude. The Kremlin also built up a so-called shadow fleet - old tankers around the world used to smuggle sanctioned oil. Erik Broekhuizen is head of tanker research at Poten & Partners, an international ship broker and energy consultant.
ERIK BROEKHUIZEN: The fleet has grown quickly from (inaudible) to maybe 600 - between 600 and a thousand now, and that has allowed Russia to maintain their exports at pretty much the pre-invasion levels.
NORTHAM: Broekhuizen says this latest round of sanctions significantly strengthens penalties, effectively barring any individual or company from the U.S. financial system if it deals with about 200 newly sanctioned shadow fleet vessels.
BROEKHUIZEN: What will happen now is all these sanctioned ships will not be allowed to go into certain ports. And it's not just China. I think India has also indicated that none of the ships that are on the sanctioned list will ultimately be able to go to India either.
NORTHAM: Sergei Guriev, professor of economics and dean at the London Business School, says efforts by the U.S. and its allies have hit Russia in other ways. It's lost hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign currency reserves. Interest rates are running at about 20%, and major energy projects in the Arctic have stalled.
SERGEI GURIEV: You see cracks, in the sense that Putin now has to increase taxes because he's running low on financial resources. He actually canceled subsidies for mortgages, so he feels financial constraint.
NORTHAM: Still, Guriev says Putin could continue waging war. President-elect Trump says he wants to use sanctions as little as possible. However, Guriev says Trump could use them as an incentive.
GURIEV: The carrot is, if you negotiate, we'll remove certain sanctions. The stick is, if you don't negotiate, we'll provide Ukraine with a lot more weapons.
NORTHAM: Guriev says it's unclear whether sanctions will ever force Putin to end the war, but adds, imagine what would have happened if no sanctions were in place.
Jackie Northam, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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