If the idea behind Vladimir Putin’s war of expansion in Ukraine was to advance Russia’s strategic interests on the global stage, arguably it has backfired.
He has fought Ukraine’s smaller military to a stalemate at best, pushed the country firmly into the arms of Europe, and rejuvenated NATO with potentially two new members in Finland and Sweden while condemning Russia to pariah status in much of the world.
But at least business hasn’t ground to a complete halt, one of the country’s best-known billionaires told the Financial Times.
“I was more or less sure that up to 30 percent of the economy would collapse, but it was way less,” Oleg Deripaska said in an interview, praising the private sector’s ability to adapt to one of the most brutal sanctions regimes in recent memory.
Deripaska, who founded the diversified industrial group Basic Element, is one of the earliest tycoons to enrich himself during the early part of Putin’s reign and now owns a controlling stake in the world’s second-largest aluminum producer, Rusal.
Unlike Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil magnate turned dissident in exile, he never challenged the authority of the Kremlin boss and has remained largely in his good graces over the course of 20 years.
Russia’s coat of armor against sanctions
Himself a target of Western sanctions, Deripaska refuted the notion that economic reprisals “will stop [the war] or create regime change, or somehow make us closer to the end of the conflict.”
Instead, he said: “We need to have another solution.”
Part of the reason Russia has been able to either mitigate or skirt a number of key sanctions, like the price cap on crude oil exports, is a lack of political will in developing countries.
Many want to offer their people the same consumer lifestyles as in the West, if not necessarily the same liberties.
Deripaska said countries like China and India therefore refused to sever their close economic ties with Putin, since they had innately practical reasons that superseded the territorial sovereignty of an eastern European country.
“You know these people need to feed one billion people every day, and [yet] you ask them to commit or suffer,” the Russian billionaire told the FT.
“Out of the next billion people who’re about to be born, 70 percent will be in this [emerging market] region. They want development, they need Russian resources.”
Now that it has little or nothing to gain from the conflict, Moscow appears to be settling into a period of maintaining the status quo rather than pursuing escalation or following through on thinly veiled threats of a nuclear strike.
‘I can’t see that anyone will reach its declared goal’
Instead, it seems content to repel this summer’s counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces while waiting for Western will to wane.
Businessmen like Elon Musk and hedge funder Bill Ackman have obliged, being among the first to call for Ukraine to cede territory in exchange for a ceasefire.
Deripaska urged NATO members not to supply fourth-generation fighter jets to Kyiv as it would only prolong the war needlessly and lead to further loss of life.
“Will you give F-16, F-35 [aircraft]?” he asked. “You know, the only goal which would be reached would be more suffering and more lives would be lost, more wounded for maybe five, ten, twenty, twenty-five kilometers left or right.”
Critics of peace talks point to Putin’s history of piecemeal territorial expansions made under the guise of protecting ethnic Russian minorities—whether it was the enclave of Abkhazia in Georgia back in 2008 or the invasion of Crimea in 2014 after pro-European forces came to power in Kyiv.
They argue attempt to arrange a ceasefire, like the Minsk Agreements nearly a decade ago, only rewards Putin for his invasion while gifting him precious time to consolidate and rebuild for the next campaign. If the Russian president can hold onto the territory he seized since he invaded last February, he can retain a land bridge to Crimea.
Deripaska acknowledged that Russia has no chance to achieve the objectives set nearly 600 days after it invaded, but warned Ukraine would equally prove incapable of expelling his country’s military from its land either.
“I can’t see that anyone will reach its declared goal,” he said.
