Ordinary people are likely to feel the pain, and none of the oligarchs directly targeted can influence Russia’s tyrant anyway
Boris Johnson is getting serious about Ukraine. He may not admit many Ukrainian refugees lest they endanger the Conservatives’ claim to being the party of low migration. But he is slamming sanctions on seven more London oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich, Igor Sechin and Oleg Deripaska. The high-profile trio, with four other oligarchs, are eerily accused of “enabling the killing of civilians, destruction of hospitals and illegal occupation of sovereign allies”. Abramovich’s Chelsea football club is to be “frozen” and banned from selling tickets. That should teach Chelsea fans a lesson about who to support, and is meant to make Vladimir Putin shake in his shoes.
War is simple. You fight. You kill. You win or you lose. Economic war, on the other hand, is a mess of signals, boycotts, ill-defined targets and indiscriminate victims. Because it is bloodless, it is somehow detached from whatever issue is at hand. Almost invariably the real sufferers are the poor and impotent. As for Abramovich, what is he supposed to do? The likelihood of his going to Moscow and persuading his chum that the invasion of Ukraine was a terrible mistake must be zero. This is foreign policy as pure theatre.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
