The West is threatening Russia with sanctions over the conflict in Ossetia. What should Russia’s response be?
Personally, I’m not afraid of any sanctions. And in general, I don’t see the West having any serious leverage in this respect. Just endless blah-blah—relations will worsen—blah-blah—decades of progress will be lost. As Bovt quite rightly wrote in his column: what, exactly, are such relations worth if, at the very first serious crisis, nothing whatsoever remains of them except the complete and undivided triumph of those notorious cynical double standards? The only kind of sanctions that would be both realistic and painful for the Russian leadership is denying visas to certain officials and creating problems for their nest eggs in the form of foreign bank accounts. I fully welcome such sanctions.