When the war started it was seizure-this and sanction-that. I’ve read that $350B in Russian assets were seized and held, while major companies exited the Russian market, the ruble crashed, and inflation rocketed.
Meanwhile the cost of the Russian war must be astronomical to maintain, imports/exports have halted with Europe, there’s no financial aid to Russia (that I’m aware of) and multi-billion dollar resource supplies were cancelled.
All this, and Russia seems to still be having a good old time. Russians are on holidays en mass, the country is buying up arms and fossil fuels like its church Sunday, and their war machine still powers away and is prepared to keep fighting for a decade if it has to.
How? How does a country take that much of a financial beating and still be thriving? Where is the point of being broke and not being able to fund a war anymore?
I don’t think sanctions really work that well if I’m honest. Cuba has been sanctioned for what 60? 70? years now and while it isn’t exactly a world superpower it’s still here and doing pretty well given the circumstances
Cubans are exceptionally poor.
No they aren’t. They have similar wealth to other Caribbean nations, being richer than places like Jamaica and Haiti but poorer than Trinidad or the Dominican Republic. In global terms they rank 83rd, so above average, and they have a relatively high development index, I.e. pretty good health care and education. They might seem poor to you, but they’re actually richer than most of world.
This is exactly right - and Russia and the Russian people experienced this lifestyle in the Soviet Union. They are fully prepared to endure it once again…
After all, the elites & sub-elites will still get everything that they want, and the Russian people thesmelves are not doing any worse than folks in third world countries (that’s for sure!) which manage to putter along under their own corrupt oligarchs, rain or shine.