Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Bogbaum here. On February twenty one, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an hour long speech where he not only recognized the independence of two Russia BacT territories in eastern Ukraine, but also delegitimized the sovereignty of Ukraine itself.
Putin expanded the idea that Ukraine's borders were drawn up by the Soviet Union's founder, Vladimir Lenin and still exist only because of the fall of the Soviet Union in After the speech, Putin ordered troops into those eastern territories
under the guise of them being peacemakers. Many experts in global geopolitics were concerned, if not horrified, by the speech and invasion, suggesting it was Putin's way of rewriting history as well as of providing a reason to launch what could become the largest war in Europe's in the end of World War Two. The speech came after Putin had
spent months building up Russian military forces surrounding Ukraine. He's also demanded Ukraine not be allowed to join NATO, the defensive alliance that currently includes thirty countries, So how is the world responding? The NATO Ukraine Commission met in Brussels on Tuesday, February twenty second two to address the situation. NATO Secretary Yan Stoltenberg said it will stand by Ukrainian sovereignty with force if necessary, but hoped Russia would still
choose diplomacy. So aside from a full on war, what else are world leaders doing to deter Putin from invading Ukraine? They're imposing sanctions. So today let's talk about what sanctions are and how they're imposed, and also what sanctions are supposed to accomplish and how they work. Very basically, sanctions are sort of economic versions of weaponry designed to turn up the pressure on another country and its regimes leaders by hitting them in their wallets. For the article this
episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Ellen laps In back In. She's the director of the Master's in International Security degree program and the Center for Security Policy Studies at George Mason University's Shore School of Policy and Government and a former vice chair of the U. S Government's National Intelligence Council. She explained sanctions are any
penalty or disruption in the normal economic relations between two countries. Usually, sanctions are supposed to target a particular bad behavior or send a signal to an unfriendly country. Sanctions often involve freezing any of the target's assets, such as real estate or funds and bank accounts that happened to be inside the US, and threatening to punish any financial institution inside or outside the US that does transactions for the adversary
or helps in some other way. But sanctions also can take a variety of other forms as well, from interrupting international trade to closing a border to suspending arms sales. The sanctions can even be tailored to hit a specific industry or part of another nations economy At any rate, it's a form of what's called coercive diplomacy. Sanctions come down to this, how do you get their attention so they're feeling some pain and give themselves incentives to change
their behavior. Here in the US, the President has sweeping authority to impose sanctions on other countries and leaders under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, of which allows him or her to impose them quote to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat. Congress has the power to hit other nations and people with sanctions as well. Back in for example, legislators passed the magnet Ski Act to impose sanctions against Russia. The law is named after a corruption
exposing lawyer who died in a Russian prison cell. In two thousand nine, a Congress imposed additional sanctions against Russia for an invasion of Ukraine. In given the current Russia Ukraine crisis, President Joe Biden announced on February twenty two that the US would impose sanctions would extend further than those implemented in including sanctions that will prohibit American financial institutions from processing transactions for large Russian banks. This will
effectively inhibit those banks from transactions involving US dollars. Leipson explained that Congress often resorts to sanctions to avoid having tensions with another country explode into armed conflict. She said, Congress often believes, let's go carefully up the escalatory ladder. Let's express our disapproval in a resolution. If they don't pay attention, will then threaten sanctions. If they still don't pay attention, we'll impose those sanctions, and then will impose
more sanctions. It's a longer continuum from peace to war. Either way. Once sanctions are imposed, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control enforces the restrictions. Of course, other countries can impose sanctions as well, though according to Leipson,
nobody utilizes the economic weapon as frequently is the US does. Instead, most only want to participate in multinational sanctions, such as those imposed by the U N Security Council, which have included economic and trade sanctions as well as arms embargoes and travel bands. Since nineteen sixty six, the U N has used such measures thirty times, punishing regimes ranging from apartheid era South Africa to North Korea. Okay, but so
do sanctions actually work? Leipson said, There's always this range of opinion about whether sanctions work or not. It depends on what your intentions were. If your intention was to punish, then just measuring the economic pain on another country is a way of saying the sanctions are working. If your intention is to truly change the behavior of the other country, you have to use a very different metric, and in that case, most sanctions fail because countries become resistant. They're
willing to absorb the pain for nationalistic reasons. They don't want to concede to a more powerful country instead of giving in. For example, a targeted nation may find another
more powerful nation to act as its patron. For example, after the US imposed a sweeping embargo on the communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba in nineteen sixty, the island nation relied upon trade with the Soviet Union, which for years bought Cuban sugar at five to six times the world market price as a way of tweaking the
United States It's Cold War adversary. There's also increasing political pushback against the sort of sanctions that broadly target and nation's economy, out of concern that they punish the population rather than the government. As Lapson explained, that's led to a shift towards the so called smart or targeted sanctions, which might be designed to target regimes leaders but allow
the country to import needed medicines. Targeted sanctions might also include arms embargoes, financial sanctions on the assets of individuals and companies, travel restrictions on the leaders of a sanctioned state, and trade sanctions on particular goods. Today's episode is based on the article why countries use economic sanctions to prevent conflict? On how s Toffworks dot com written by Patrick J. Keaiger.
Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership with hous Tofworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clang and Ramsey Young. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H