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Putin Doesn’t Care About Sanctions

Jakub Ferencik
5 min readAug 16, 2022

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At the end of the day, it’s become increasingly clear that Putin doesn’t care about the sanctions against him, his cronies, or the people of Russia. Putin cares about his empire and legacy.

And on our current trajectory, sanctions haven’t done nearly enough. We have to look beyond them and continue military and humanitarian support. As many Ukrainians have been pointing out, without military supplies, their resistance will eventually be futile.

Photo by Rostislav Artov on Unsplash

We’ve all heard it countless times now: Europe is funding Putin’s war efforts. That much is evident. But there doesn’t seem to be a way around that in the short-term sadly.

For example, a Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) study, estimated that the EU has daily transferred $730 million to Putin’s war machine, which is roughly four times more than Russia’s daily military spending.

Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s former Chancellor, claimed that even if we warrant a shift away from Russia in energy (his words — not mine), Germany will still have to come back to Russia as a trade exporter when the war is over because of rare earths they receive from Russia, which “cannot simply be substituted.”

Schröder has come under a lot of criticism because of his views and relationship with Putin, but also because of his present…

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Jakub Ferencik
Jakub Ferencik

Written by Jakub Ferencik

Journalist living in Prague | Author of “Up in the Air” and “Beyond Reason” on AMAZON | MA McGill Uni | 750+ articles with 1+ mil. views

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