NO They will fail in multiple ways
U.S. and EU economic sanctions had no political effect on Moscow’s seizure of Crimea in the spring of 2014, before or after.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that sanctions reduced Russia’s Gross Domestic Product by a barely measurable 1.5 per cent.
The most optimistic evaluation sets the cost to Russia at a cumulative $300 billion (U.S.) and 2.3 per cent annual loss of growth, all without reducing popular support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, generating a viable opposition to his government, or hurting Russia’s coterie of oligarchs, with their substantial foreign investments.
In fact, the threat of sanctions against Russia over the crisis in Ukraine is illegitimate because it does not directly address the right of self-determination raised by Moscow, signals NATO’s irresoluteness as it is being used as a substitute for military redeployments, and most worryingly, it is cementing the Moscow-Beijing-Tehran Axis.
The West’s uncompromising policy with Moscow is based on the widespread, but false belief, that Putin is unpopular. This has led to the twin fantasies that NATO can forever expand East, and that Moscow can be pressured to liberalize.
However, corrupt governance in Ukraine makes it a poor candidate for either the EU or NATO for at least a generation.
Instead, these provocative policies have aggravated relations with Moscow, pushed it into aiding China and Iran and triggered an endless wave of cyberharassment. Finally, NATO is simply unwilling to fight to defend Ukraine
Sanctions are a useful form of virtue signalling, but they never work when it comes to disputes over territory or ethnic conflict.
According to Robert Pape, professor at the University of Chicago, territorial losses are believed to be irreversible and to encourage future compellence to relinquish territory, so states will never concede territory or claims because of economic pressure.
Also, the burdens of sanctions are easily anticipated and often shifted to disenfranchised groups within society. This is why sanctions failed to dislodge the Sunni political elite in Iraq in 1990 and after, failed to compel Serbia to abandon Kosovo before 1999, and failed against Myanmar’s repeated military takeovers. A Brookings Institution study from the Cold War era found that sanctions work best for minor issues.
Moscow is asserting control over territory where there are significant Russian communities: nine million in Ukraine and half a million in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
The principle of self-determination, that ethnic communities have a right to rule themselves, was widely established in the West at the end of the First World War, and determined by plebiscite.
Of course, identity is complex: approximately half of the ethnic Russians in Ukraine, especially the post-Soviet youth, as well a substantial number of Russians that reside in Ukraine as a dissident sanctuary from Putin’s regime, would resist being cobbled into a Moscow-protected enclave.
Also, the European Union has submerged the principle of self-determination in order to preserve the stability of their community, building on the traumatic lessons of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Applying the principle of self-determination within Europe would see secession in Spain, Belgium, Turkey, France, Romania, England and elsewhere.
There is, however, no evidence that Russia has any designs on territories not inhabited by Russians, so this is not a Munich moment. Russia is likely to defend this core principle, since it legitimizes its influence in neighbouring states where there are substantial Russian populations, such as Belarus (700,000), Kazakhstan (3.5 million), Uzbekistan (700,000), Kyrgyzstan (400,000) and Turkmenistan (300,000).
Protecting Ukraine by confronting Russia is far less important than appeasing Russian concerns and peeling Moscow away from its near-alliance relationship with Beijing.
This is because Moscow has legitimate interests, whereas China currently has unlimited global ambitions. To allow NATO to be misdirected by such a textbook case of a narrowly regional concern, would be a classic strategic mistake.
It would split European NATO from the U.S., into separate confrontations with Russia and China.
NATO and the EU should therefore manoeuvre Ukraine to accede to a compromise solution granting autonomy to self-identified Russian communities in Ukraine, before it is too late.
If that is insufficient to assuage Russian concerns about the integrity of their sphere of influence, an alternative is the architecture of the 1955 Austrian State Treaty.
This agreement secured Austrian neutrality and exclusion from NATO, as a quid pro quo for Soviet military withdrawal from Vienna and its quarter of the country, creating a stable buffer state between Italy and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.
JULIAN SPENCER-CHURCHILL IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY.