Why sanctions may backfire — Heribert Dieter

The title should be, Why sanctions are backfiring. The hypotheticals are present realities.

Interestingly, many have observed that when sanctions were used, war not long behind but they also perfunctorily say that this situation is likely different. Really? War is already raging and escalating along with increased sanctions that are having no noticeable effect on Russia' behavior.

This is a policy mistake that is turning into a strategic blunder of major proportions. Iraq was a strategic blunder but proportionately insignificant in comparison with Russia and China, who have been driven together into a de facto alliance against the US and its allies, many of whom have been dragged into this unfolding conflict reluctantly. War is returning to Europe, the very thing that NATO, the Common Market,  the European Union and the Eurozone were meant to obviate.

Progress in Political Economy (PPE) 
Why sanctions may backfire
Heribert Dieter | Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin, Germany. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR), University of Warwick, UK

See also

Less than 9 percent of about 1,400 EU and G7 companies that had subsidiaries in Russia before Moscow invaded Ukraine had divested at least one subsidiary in the country by November 2022, according to data obtained by professor Simon Evenett, from the University of St. Gallen, and and professor Niccolò Pisani, from the International Institute for Management Development. This is despite the harshest ever Western sanctions against Moscow and the media reports of multiple companies’ exits from the country since the start of the Ukraine war.

"These findings call into question the willingness of Western firms to decouple from economies their governments now deem to be geopolitical rivals," the study's authors say in a statement.…

This may have something to do with the US exempting itself from sanctions when convenient. 

Politico (German-owned)
Majority of Western companies doing business as usual in Russia, study finds