The Counterproductive Effects of Western Sanctions on Russia's Economic Resilience: Analyzing Through Baldwin's Economic Interdependence Perspective

Western sanctions after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine aimed to isolate Russia economically to force Russia's capitulation. However, the economic strategies which the West developed, such as trade diversions, import substitutions, and, most notably, innovative financing, paradoxically strengthened Moscow. This paper uses the paradigm of economic interdependence, as described by Baldwin, to analyze these paradoxical situations, with emphasis on the asymmetries of vulnerabilities and opportunity costs, policy tools and the incentives of the politics that transform what the West will consider negative sanctions, Russia will consider positive defenses. From Baldwin's perspective, the 15,000+ sanctions imposed on Russia represent an over extension which provided Russia with an underutilized leaver which was the set of trade relations with the primary senders of the sanctions, specifically a positively resource-rich Russia and its newly acquired multi-polar trading relations with India and China. This complicated the West's plans, causing them to rely on their own pirate neutral trading, as they needed to supply their own imposed regulations, thus creating their own compliance and cicatrix methods of financing. Shadow and interfacing. Obelians or other catalyst blimps intertwined the perceptions of the Global South regarding Western credibility. The analysis yields expected or rational negative outcomes, where there are not solely signs of a cohesive order based on the reestablishment of multifaceted, targeted, and neutral strategies created by the will of the West to impose a system of guidance on the self-composed pirated method of tributaries to drain diverters.