US campaign to isolate Russia shows limits after two years of war

The Biden administration and European allies are calling President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a tyrant and a war criminal. But he enjoys a standing invitation to Brazil’s halls of power.

Brazil’s president says Ukraine and Russia are both responsible for the war that started with the invasion of the Russian army. And his country’s purchases of Russian energy and fertilizer have soared, pumping billions of dollars into the Russian economy.

The views of the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, sum up the global tension the United States and Ukraine find themselves in as the war enters its third year.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Biden administration activated a diplomatic offensive as important as its fight to ship weapons to the Ukrainian military. With economic sanctions and a call for a collective defense of the international order, the United States sought to punish Russia with economic pain and political exile. The aim was for companies and countries to cut ties with Moscow.

But two years later, Putin is not nearly as isolated as U.S. officials had hoped. Russia’s inherent strength, rooted in its vast reserves of oil and natural gas, has created a financial and political resilience that threatens to outlast Western opposition. His influence could grow in parts of Asia, Africa and South America. And his grip on power in his own country appears to be as strong as ever.

The war has undoubtedly taken its toll on Russia, destroying the country’s position vis-à-vis much of Europe. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Mr Putin. The United Nations has repeatedly condemned the invasion.

And to hear Biden administration officials tell it, Russia has suffered a major strategic failure.

“Today, Russia is more isolated on the world stage than ever,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in June. Putin’s war, he added, “has reduced Russian influence on every continent.”

Outside of North America and Europe, there is evidence to the contrary.

China, India and Brazil are buying Russian oil in record quantities and are relishing the deep discounts Putin is now offering to countries willing to replace his lost European customers. These growing economic relationships have come with strong diplomatic ties, including with some close U.S. partners. Mr Putin visited Beijing in October and hosted the Indian foreign minister in Moscow in late December. A few weeks earlier, Putin received a warm welcome in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where he was greeted with a salute from 21 guns and fighter jets overhead that trailed smoke in the red, white and blue of the Russian flag.

Russian influence is also expanding in Africa, according to a new report from the Royal United Services Institute, a security think tank based in London. When Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, died last summer, Russian military intelligence took over Wagner’s extensive operations in Africa and made further inroads against governments that rely on the group for their security.

“Russia is by no means landlocked,” said Michael Kimmage, a Cold War historian at the Catholic University of America and a State Department official in the Obama administration. “It is not economically contained, it is not diplomatically contained and it is delivering its message about the war.”

According to some Russian experts, American and European leaders have not fully taken this reality into account.

“What Western leaders clearly have not done is align with their publics on the enduring nature of the threat from an emboldened, revisionist Russia,” wrote Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in November an essay for The Wall Street Journal accuses the West of “magical thinking” about Mr Putin’s plight.

A good example of the disappointment is Mr. Putin’s welcome mat in Brazil, Latin America’s largest and most influential nation.

Mr Lula has invited Mr Putin to attend a Group of 20 leadership summit in Brazil in November, even though his country is a member of the International Criminal Court and obliged to execute the court’s arrest warrant against the Russian leader . (Mr. Lula sidestepped questions in December about whether Mr. Putin would be arrested if he showed up, calling it a “judicial decision.”)

Brazil’s continued neutral stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine emerged Wednesday during a meeting in Brasilia, the country’s capital, between Mr. Lula and Mr. Blinken. Mr Lula has called for peace talks, a position Ukraine has criticized, and has said the United States is fueling the war with its arms deliveries to Kiev. Mr. Blinken told Mr. Lula that the United States believed that conditions were not good for diplomacy at the moment.

Later that day, Mr. Blinken landed in Rio de Janeiro for a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of 20 countries and heard Brazil’s top diplomat, Mauro Vieira, say: “Brazil will not accept a world in which differences are resolved through the use of military resources. power.”

Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, was present. While Mr. Blinken and a handful of colleagues from allied countries denounced the Russian war, other officials followed the Brazilian minister’s lead in expressing neutral sentiments or remained silent on the conflict.

Last year, Mr. Lavrov attended a similar event in India, was welcomed by Mr. Lula to the presidential residence and visited more than a dozen African countries, including South Africa, Sudan and Kenya.

He had a meeting in New York last month with António Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations – which the Russian Foreign Ministry had advertised in a message. press release which showed the two men shaking hands.

At the United Nations, U.S.-led resolutions condemning the war have found little support among countries not closely aligned with the United States or Russia, demonstrating their reluctance to be forced to take a side in the conflict.

“These countries are wary of being seen as pawns on a chessboard of great-power competition,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. “The last administration has done a lot of damage to our relationship with many of these countries. We are not seen as a credible partner.”

“Russian disinformation has been effective in many places,” she added. “And Russia has invested decades in many of these countries.”

Moscow has also tried to avoid blame for higher food and energy prices resulting from the invasion. A few weeks ago, Russia delivered 34,000 tons of free fertilizer to Nigeria, one of many shipments it has sent to Africa.

Mr. Putin can afford such largesse, not to mention a war of attrition in eastern Ukraine, because Russia has replaced lost energy customers in Europe by selling far more on other continents. The International Energy Agency reported last month that Russia exported 7.8 million barrels of oil per day in December, the highest in nine months – and only slightly below pre-war levels.

At the same time, oil export revenues that month amounted to $14.4 billion, the lowest in half a year. According to the agency, Western efforts to enforce a price ceiling on Russian oil appear to have hit overall revenues, as well as a decline in the world crude oil price.

Russia’s position benefits from President Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, analysts say. Many leaders see hypocrisy in US condemnations of Russian attacks on civilian areas and infrastructure in Ukraine, unmoved by the argument that Israel is committed to preventing civilian casualties while Russia has deliberately targeted innocents.

In addition, Russia has managed to forge closer ties with its close partners, what Ms. Polyakova calls a “new authoritarian alliance.” These countries – China, North Korea and Iran – have provided assistance to Moscow in various forms. North Korea sends ballistic missiles for use in Ukraine, Iran continues to ship drones and China, while refraining from exporting weapons to Russia, allows equipment that civilians and the military can use into Moscow’s hands.

China has maintained trade with Russia and is filling the gaps left by Western companies, ensuring the supply of everything from household goods to financial services.

As for sanctions aimed at limiting Russia’s access to high technology, especially equipment that could be used for modern weapons, Mr Putin has found solutions. Neighboring countries such as Armenia and Turkey, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have not joined the US sanctions regime, and private companies there import microchips and other items for re-export to Russia.

Western sanctions and business boycotts have certainly affected daily life in Russia, albeit in many cases through inconveniences such as the loss of Apple Pay and Instagram – not enough to fuel popular unrest or change Putin’s behavior.

“In the here and now, the sanctions have disappointed,” said Edward Fishman, a former State Department official in the Obama administration who oversaw sanctions on Russia after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014.

Mr Fishman said Western sanctions would take a greater toll over time. Despite legal loopholes and black market trading, Russia will struggle to acquire critical high-tech components. And broken deals with Western energy companies will deprive Russia of the investments it needs to maintain efficient oil and gas production.

But he said Putin had prepared his country for an onslaught of sanctions and had come up with plenty of options to maintain his war machine and influence on the world stage.

“Unfortunately, Russia has now built something of an alternative supply chain,” Mr. Fishman said.

He added that Mr. Biden could take even bolder steps to crack down on Russian energy exports and technology imports. But that would mean friction with countries that have become major buyers of Russian oil, such as India, which could only reduce their imports under the threat of sanctions or other punitive measures that could risk a diplomatic crisis.

Likewise, many companies that reap big profits by serving as middlemen for banned technology items are in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, two partners with whom Mr. Biden would rather not confront.

Perhaps most intimidating is the fact that curtailing Russian oil exports will certainly drive up global oil prices — bad news for the United States and a president who will face voters this fall.

“I think there’s a lot of nerves involved in doing something that could roil global oil markets,” Mr. Fishman said, “especially in an election year.”