The overall impact of the Western sanctions is difficult to assess, because they coincided with a drop in oil prices, which further strained the Russian budget and suppressed the value of the ruble. Most authors have focused on the oil price that fell in 2014 as the main cause of Russia’s economic demise, but one tends to find what one is looking for.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) observed that economic growth “virtually stopped when sanctions and lower oil prices hit in 2014. This session takes a deep dive into the effect of the current sanctions and looks at how effective have they really been?