NPR.
This is the indicator from Planet Money.
I'm Darian Woods.
And today I'm joined by NPR's International Affairs correspondent, Jackie Norther.
Hey Darian, good to be here.
Great to have you too.
And today we're going to talk about sanctions, specifically sanctions against Russia.
And there are a lot of them.
The US and many of its allies have slapped more than 5,000 sanctions on Russia
since it invaded Ukraine.
And the breadth of these sanctions is pretty stunning.
They're targeting everything from Russia's energy to its oligarchs.
All of this is to try to make it more difficult for the Kremlin to finance the war.
Yeah, and they have had an effect.
We're seeing cracks in Russia's economy,
and President Vladimir Putin has had to jack up taxes and interest rates,
and hundreds of billions of dollars have been drained from Russia's foreign currency reserves.
And yet, here we are three and a half years later and the war in Ukraine is still grinding on.
And it turns out that those thousands of sanctions have not brought the Kremlin to its knees.
Not at all.