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Russian banks say they've run out of yuan as Chinese firms pull away from the nation
(markets.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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Sanctions work.
This is what frustrates me so much about people in the US arguing against supporting Ukraine. At the end of the day, while China might be willing to help Russia, the US is by far it's largest customer. Add to that China's own economy is contracting, and supporting Ukraine against Putin, along with the severe sanctions that have been in place, is the smartest most cost effective way of hopefully removing him from power. I have a co-worker who got out of Russia a little over a year ago, and he said it was pretty bad before he and his family left. Unfortunately, it's a slow process because the goal is to get the Russian people to oust him. We all know that's not going to happen at the ballot box, so all that's left is the people overthrowing their leaders. Things have to get pretty dire before a population like Russia's gets to that tipping point.
This is a marathon. The main thing is keeping Ukraine strong and able to defend itself. I'm really liking the offensives into Russian territory they've been carrying out. I just want them to remember a defensive position is easier to maintain/win than an offensive one. In other words, don't try to go to far into Russia. Way way too many great generals have made that mistake!
That's true and there's also more to it.
The US is China's largest single trading partner but China has many many trading partners.
May nations now trade or at least negotiate in blocks. Both ASEAN and the UE, as blocks, do more trade with China than the US does. When it comes to individual nations the US isn't as far ahead as it might seem. Russia, Vietnam and Taiwan together trade more with China than the US does, despite having a combined GDP that's a tiny fraction of the US.
The key issue is that China has been working really hard to make itself less dependent on the US. They still have a way to go but they're much less vulnerable than they were a few years ago.
Fair points, but I would also add that while the US isn’t a block, they do hold sway with a number of other countries. NATO is also involved in this equation. China also has significant investments in the US. I don’t fault China for seeing economic opportunity in Russia, but they have to walk a pretty fine line if they’re going to make it work.
China knows that the US has a lot of economic leverage. They've been working very hard to change that and a lot of those efforts have flown under the radar.
BRI is pretty obvious and it's seen as one of the major reason the ASEAN countries are pivoting towards China. But consider the whole South China Sea issue. Everyone frames it as a contest over sea resources and few people consider the strait of Malacca. It's a potential choke point for all trade west of Southeast Asia. While China is working to be able to defend that they're also working with Thailand to build a canal that would bypass the straight of Malacca all together. All of that is primarily to reduce US leverage and those initiatives tend to work more often than they fail.
This is a crazy pipe dream by the Thai PM, China has nothing to do with it. It doesn't make any sense to unload ships in Thailand, move them by train across the peninsula, and then reload them onto ships. They can go via other routes in Indonesia if they don't want to go through the straight of Malacca for some reason. The Thai PM is just jealous that all the shipping trade (and money) goes to Singapore and Malaysia because it is easier for the boats to stop there.
Not fast enough. I agree they work, but often times it hurts all the people, and the ones that have "say" often are slow to help their fellow people.
Hence, the point of sanctions.
How is hurting everyone the point?
To piggyback on @Syntha@sh.itjust.works, the point of sanctions is to create an extreme economic cost to a state as a bargaining chip. Stop doing the thing we don't like and you get your trade back. Unfortunately, states control the national currency (most of the time), which means anyone who uses that currency also gets hit. There is no way around that.
Politically speaking, a majority of Russians have been utterly disenfranchised from politics, repeating the refrain "I'm not political" like it's a magic spell that will ward off the consequences of their government. Consequently I'm not that sad about them experiencing a bit of economic hardship. Maybe it'll help them realize that politics isn't just for politicians.
Their country, their responsibility.
The Germans learned that lesson the hard way.
Exactly. In any semi-functional democracy the government isn't some abstract entity you have no power over, and it's not monolithic either (you have municipal, regional and national levels). You vote for the people in it and they represent you.
Incrimental economical hardships get obfuscated by the state so no one draws a line between that and the war, or if they do, they have 1000+1 reasons why it went this way thanks to propaganda. Until it is a direct shock treatment at some industries, it would be toned down by the effort of local economical institutions. I'm the outlier in buying things in non-chinese services and following western media it seems, and slowing down the YouTube was the first event when I noticed many previously apolitical person to find their ways to circumvent the ban.
The most energized groups are those of recent soldiers and their families, and their protests get shut down fast. It's genuinely afraid of them. And it feels like the way it would happen.
Maybe. The point of the sanctions isn't to cause unrest though, as I said, it's to apply pressure to the state. If it happens to cause some unrest, that's an unlikely side-benefit.
What can hurt it in your opinion?
Military stuff is out of the picture since they established their trade with CCP and NK for rockets and found their ways to get European chips. They are investigated, but slowly.
My guess is that a lot of ingredients used in their production lines of food are imported, like specific kinds of yeast to make bread and beer or something like that. I wonder if sanctions targeting non-consumer products critical to producing them can lead to long pauses I'd read about in military once some key suppliers got cut off.
Not all rockets are made equally. The NK rockets, artillery barrels and artillery shells are much worse than they could manufacture with western components. A degradation in quality leading to less accuracy which lessens the battlefield impact is still a positive step.
It also means that China can take advantage of Russia to get much more than it could usually get for their gear. China is not helping Russia out of the goodness of it's heart or some ideological reason. They're taking advantage.
Interesting question. I have no idea. I'm pretty confident all sanctions so far are for gas, oil, and military/dual-use technology.
Yep, China, and Iran and India and whoever else. Current admin sets the conditions of trade that would scar the economy long after all these senile gambling gramps die. Reparations don't sound that awful when you consider how much shit they probably promised to or leased from these 'brotherly' countries. Even if I happened to be a Z-patriot, I can't see myself swallowing that.
You are right. And the fact that they scratch the bottom of the barrel like asking NK means they are desperate. Still, not enough supplies to Ukraine to counter that and I want them to have these, as a russian citizen.
No, you're right, we can't do anything beyond harsh criticism, no, even that's too far, what if we hurt some of the genocider's feelings?
They're sending their kids into a meat grinder because they hope other people's kids will feel more pain in that same meat grinder.
I didn't say that.
How have sanctions changed anything?
China is pulling all their funding from Russia due to sanctions. That's the article we're in the comments of.
Chinese businesses. "All" is not true. And what changes will this result in?
Uh, Russia will be too broke to continue funding their war offensive in Ukraine, and then if they try to continue it anyway they'll be too broke to continue functioning as a nation. That's kind of the point of sanctions. Did you read the article?
Drop the war, investors return, everyone is happy. If they want to continue the war they better start checking their couch cushions for rubles. That's what the sanctions are for, that's what they do. It's a lever to pull to convince Putin to back off his warmongering without resorting to direct violence against Moscow and, undoubtedly, innocents caught up in it.
Again, when has that occurred? Any examples.
You're intentionally being obtuse.
That's one way to avoid answering the question I suppose.
There is no other way
What examples of sanctions on a country have seen change? Regime, attitudes, or the like.
The goal is to make the cost of waging war increasingly painful to pay. There is no other way to effectively do this than to target the entire country.
Off the top my head, the sanctions on Iran were pretty effective to get them to negotiate the nuclear deal. Until Trump tore that one up, that is.
I understand what sanctions are supposed to achieve, but I would like examples of when that has actually happened.
Edit my comment to add the Iran example
That's one reduction in sanctions example, which does not stand to this day and has seen the country distancing itself further than ever.
You asked for an example of a country changing its attitude, that is what happened in Iran to negotiate the nuclear deal. Now you are moving the goal posts and claiming that it wasn't sufficiently successful in the long run. That may well be, but it has nothing to do with the presence or absence of sanctions.
I also want to point out that sanctions often work far more subtly than what you imagine. If six months from now, Ukraine and Russia engage in successful peace talks, sanctions will certainly have played a role in shifting Russia's position closer to that of Ukraine, but on the surface it will be impossible to tell by how much.
Sure, I said it was one example, I just added context afterwards. I also asked for examples, not just one which has seen zero other impact except hurting the citizens.
No need to guess about what might happen, we can look at past sanctions instead.
But it has seen an impact, it resulted in the JCPOA
The alternative is usually waiting until the other side goes too far and you have to go to war.
Though in Russia's case, that would take 5 minutes before they bombed their own kremlin by mistake.
I'm interested in examples not hypotheticals.
Hitler, the Sudatenland, WW2.
Who else will march the street in protest?
Do you have examples of sanctions resulting in protests which have changed something for the better?
You can't avoid that in a dictatorship or oligarchy. You freeze all of their money? They will just steal more from the population.
Cuba is stubborn and resource efficient, Venezuela is decently resource rich and the sanctions are relatively new, Iran still has some trade partners and is decently rich in resources, North Korea is propped up by China and is kind of an anomaly. Sanctions are rather long term and take certain conditions to work properly, Russia fits those conditions despite them theoretically being resistant to sanctions.
Right, so... they don't work, they just hurt people. Those are a lot of anomalies which prove the point made.
Nope, most sanctions have a defined purpose even still. The Russian sanctions target their oil export and certain high tech bits of equipment think night vision goggles and cpus. This alone has hindered them rather well in Ukraine to the point id call it an ongoing success. Iran is very similar they just aint as inept as Russia so its been lessened. Venezuela has been on the brink for years now so we'll see how that works out. And the North Koreans wouldve collapsed five times over by now without China, the operational purpose to the sanctions on them is to basically keep them from getting air and becoming a proper threat. Cuba is just kinda chilling, island nations can just kinda do that sometimes.