[trhway]

If the sanctions weren't effective Russia wouldn't be insisting on the lifting of the sanctions as a part of any Ukrainian deal.

The sanctions significantly slow down Russian development and are more and more making it into just a mineral mining satellite of China. With time the weakened Russia would just split, and the large eastern part will go to China. Some midparts, with Turkic speaking population may even fall into Turkey orbit. Without the oil and gas rich East, the European part of Russia will be just a destitute village on the far margins of civilized Europe as it had been for centuries in the past.

[jbstack]

> If the sanctions weren't effective Russia wouldn't be insisting on the lifting of the sanctions as a part of any Ukrainian deal.

If the sanctions were effective Russia wouldn't be offering entirely one-sided deals that it knows nobody is going to accept, because it would be desperate enough to get those sanctions lifted that it would actually have to concede something in a deal.

[trhway]

Sanctions don't prevent the short-term behavior. Russia thinks that it is winning in Ukraine - thus the one-sided deals, it isn't about the other side accepting it, for Russia it is about Russia forcing such a deal, and it always includes lifting of the sanctions as a key element of a deal that Russia is trying to force because even with traditional lack of long-term vision they understand that the sanctions are crippling the country. They think that winning the war, forcing such a one-sided deal, is the only way to get the sanctions lifted "cleanly", and any deal with concessions, etc. would look less than victorious and would probably have the sanctions lift incomplete/incremental and boggled down with conditions, etc.