January 21: “U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after talks with Russia’s foreign minister on Friday that Moscow would face a “swift, severe and a united response” if it invades Ukraine.
February 12, from the White House readout of a call between President Biden and Putin: “President Biden was clear that, if Russia undertakes a further invasion of Ukraine, the United States together with our Allies and partners will respond decisively and impose swift and severe costs on Russia.”
February 19, Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at the Munich Security Conference: “We have prepared, together, economic measures that will be swift, severe, and united.”
Got that? Swift and severe! Swift and severe!
And then today, the White House unveiled the “first tranche” of sanctions, targeting two major Russian state-owned financial institutions, imposing additional restrictions on Russian sovereign debt, and sanctioning five Kremlin-connected elites. Obviously, the Biden administration can take additional steps and indicated it will do so in the coming days.
But after months of promising “swift and severe costs,” the administration isn’t yet taking any actions against Russia’s largest banks. Today’s move targets the Corporation Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs Vnesheconombank and Promsvyazbank Public Joint Stock Company. But today’s decision leaves most of the largest Russian banks untouched, at least for now.
So far, there’s no talk of sanctions on Russian oil and gas exports to the United States, nor barring imports of Russian platinum, iron, steel, fertilizers, etc.
Nor is the U.S. barring Russian access to SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.
No talk of banning Aeroflot airlines from U.S. airports. We haven’t even done the usual move of expelling the Russian embassy staffers that we know are spies.
The promised “swift and severe sanctions” look an awful lot like “gradual and moderate sanctions.”
Now, it’s possible that no combination of sanctions is going to deter Vladimir Putin. But if Putin’s strategy is to gradually and steadily take more of Ukraine through “salami tactics” — one slice at a time — then a gradually escalating series of sanctions isn’t likely to deter him at all. The whole process is a slow walk towards the same destination — with a signal to Putin that the “swift and severe sanctions” rhetoric was yet another case of over-promising and under-delivering.
If you want to deter Putin, you have to inflict a cost severe enough to discourage the next escalation. Perhaps economic sanctions just can’t do that. If they can’t, then the best move would be to turn the roads and railways between Poland and Kiev into seemingly endless convoys of weapons shipments — making clear that any conquest of Ukraine would cost Russia a fortune in blood and treasure.