One of the things I noticed in the months after Russia invaded Ukraine was the large number of Western analysts who made Russia out to be much stronger than it really is. These folks enthusiastically used the term “Fortress Russia” to describe the fact that Russia had built large foreign exchange reserves to wall itself off financially from the rest of the world, making it - supposedly - impervious to Western sanctions. All that stuff was nonsense. Russia is uniquely vulnerable to Western sanctions, as this year’s wave of US, EU and UK sanctions on the shadow fleet shows. It’s similarly fashionable these days to ... (full story)