Russian oligarch Deripaska tells FT Western sanctions won’t stop Ukraine war

The oligarch Oleg Deripaska stated that the Russia endured Western sanctions imposed on it over its invasion of Ukraine and warned that Western hopes that it would use such a 19th-century tool to end the war or cause regime change are doomed to failure. The president Vladimir Putin prepares the Russian economy of 2.1 trillion dollars for a long war in Ukraine and has repeatedly caused the West saying it failed to hit Russia, which is forecast to grow 2.8% this year and 2.3% next year.

Western hopes that it would trigger a quick economic crisis in Russia have been proven wrong: the world’s second-largest oil exporter has no problem selling its oil on world markets while trade is booming with China – and with some other countries. “I was surprised that the private companies were so flexible. I was more or less certain that up to 30 percent of the economy would collapse, but it was much less,” the 55-year-old tycoon told the Financial Times (FT).

Deripaska said that Russia’s vast wealth of natural resources made it too attractive for many – including China and other countries – to never leave, and that the West’s hopes that it would use the sanctions to change the leaders of Russia are doomed.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, Deripaska himself has been under sanctions from Britain over his alleged ties to Putin. Legal action has been launched against the sanctions. “Believing that the sanctions will stop [τον πόλεμο] or they will bring about regime change or somehow bring us closer to the end of the conflict…. No. We need another solutionhe told the FT. Deripaska, who studied physics at Moscow University, got into metals trading when the Soviet Union collapsed and made his fortune buying stakes in aluminum factories. He founded RUSAL, which merged the jewels of the Soviet aluminum industry into a holding company, in 2000. According to this year’s Russian edition of Forbes, he is the 54th richest man in Russia with a fortune worth $2.5 billion.

Deripaska still owns a part of Rusal through his stake in parent company En+ Group. He said he doubted whether sanctions, which he called a 19th-century tool, would work as a panacea in a global world. “I always had my doubts about this Wunderwaffe, as the Germans used to say, of sanctions that weaponize the financial system as a kind of tool for negotiation,” Deripaska said. “Yes, there’s war spending and all these subsidies and government support but it’s still a hopelessly low slowdown… The private economy has found a way to make it work and do it successfully.”

The United States in 2018 imposed sanctions on Deripaska and other influential Russians for what it said were profits from a Russian state engaged in “vicious activities” around the world. The sanctions, an attempt to punish Moscow for alleged meddling in the 2016 US election, were “baseless, ridiculous and absurd”, Deripaska said at the time.