The World Is Abandoning Survivors of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence—We Must Not Look Away

In an op-ed, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Feride Rushiti calls on the world not to abandon survivors of wartime sexual violence as cuts to survivor services in Kosovo threaten to erase decades of progress in justice, healing, and dignity for victims.

Under the headline, “The Limited Effectiveness of Western Sanctions on Russia’s Economy”, the article reads:

That existing sanctions cannot be ineffective is also shown by the fact that Russia regularly calls on Western countries to lift them.**

The exclusion from the Swift system must have been particularly painful: Russia regularly demands from Europe and the US to be reconnected to the international payment system.

A few points:

The inflation in Russia is in the double-digit numbers, for food it is >30% (and these are the official numbers provided by Rosstat, Russia’s national statistics office), the central bank raised the interest rate to 21%.

Russian banks must fear to run out of liquidity to the point that it threatens its existence in the long term -especially if state-subsidized loans for the military industry, the construction business, and others run out in times of peace- as per the Central Bank of Russia (its governor has already warned about that at the end of 2024).

Even Russian-based consultancies estimate that there will be a severe shortage of workers in the coming years not in the least due to military enlistments (the Center for European Policy Analysis estimates that between 10,000 and 30,000 workers join the army every month, about 0.5 percent of the total supply) and a brain drain of skilled workers who left the country.

One of my favorite experts for this matter is Natalia Zubarevich, Professor of the Department of Economic And Social Geography of Russia of the Moscow State University, who predicted in 2023: 'There Will Be no Collapses, but Rather a Viscous, Slow Sinking into Backwardness’

Addition: But I agree with the article that China and other countries support Russia to circumvent sanctions and help Russia’s war machine running.