Moscow has been quick to shrug off the coordinated sanctions against its two biggest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.
“Counterproductive” is how the Russian Foreign Ministry described the measures.
It warned the Trump administration that it would fail and accused the EU of being unable to accept that its sanctions don’t work.
Ukraine war latest: Putin ally’s warning over sanctions
It’s a similar response in the papers. “Couldn’t you have come up with something better?” asks the Russian tabloid, Komsomolskaya Pravda.
The broadsheet Izvestia newspaper quotes two American “political scientists” who predict the sanctions will backfire and hurt Europe instead.
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New US sanctions on Russia: What do we know?
Such bravado was predictable. Russia never likes to show weakness. Underneath it, though, I think there will be concern.
That’s because these aren’t just any sanctions. They are coordinated measures which target the economic equivalent of Russia’s crown jewels.
I think there is also a degree of surprise at the US sanctions, which mark the first time this Trump administration has taken punitive action against Russia.
After months of threats that failed to amount to anything, there seemed to be a belief here that the American president would never actually do it. That he was all mouth and no trousers.
So there’ll be surprise at that, and also at how quickly this U-turn has come about.
Vladimir Putin. Pic: Grigory Sysoyev, Sputnik/AP
Less than a week ago, Donald Trump appeared to be buddying up with Vladimir Putin, with talk of a get-together in Budapest. Now all of a sudden, there’s no summit, only sanctions.
Will the sanctions work? Will they hurt the “Kremlin’s war machine”, as the US Treasury put it.
Short answer – probably not immediately.
Moscow has been able to maintain military spending via tax hikes and spending cuts elsewhere, and economists believe there’s still some fat Russia can trim, for example, infrastructure investment, before scaling back defence.
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Longer term, though, in six months, say, the consensus among experts is that it will be felt, assuming it forces countries like China and India to reduce their imports of Russian oil.
But even if that’s the case, will it force Mr Putin to change course? There’s certainly no sign of that yet.
In spite of the sanctions, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said that Moscow’s goals “remain unchanged”.
While former-president-turned-Kremlin-hawk Dmitiry Medvedev went further, suggesting the move merely allows Moscow to step up its military campaign against Ukraine “without regard to unnecessary negotiations”.
