US sanctions crusade against Moscow has run its course: Deputy FM

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Sergey Ryabkov, deputy foreign minister of Russia, said the US sanctions pressure against the country has both conceptually and practically run their course.

"Sanction pressure has run its course conceptually, and it has exhausted itself tangibly. There are many in the West who admit that the sanctions are not working," he said.

Russia "is hearing of another attempt at blackmail with new sanctions," according to Ryabkov.

"But there are more and more people in the West who believe, and rightly so, that these sanctions are more damaging to the business interests, and to the populations of the very countries that impose them," the senior diplomat stressed.

In an earlier report by CNN, sentiments of disappointment are growing amongst US officials regarding the lack of "significant effects" resulting from the sanctions imposed on Russia despite expanding them repeatedly.

The report asserted that Washington had expected that the Russian economy would be in a worse state than where it currently stands given that the anti-Russia sanctions have expanded in both scope and intensity since the start of the war in Ukraine.

One senior US official cited in the report argued that “we were expecting that things like SWIFT and all the blocking sanctions on Russia’s banks would totally crater the Russian economy and that basically, by now going into September, we’d be dealing with an economically much more weakened Russia than the one that we are dealing with.”

Moreover, the official explained that the initial approach toward anti-Russia sanctions led by the US will be “a mid-to-long term sanctions regime,” adding that the reason "is because we wanted to keep pressure on Russia over the long term as it waged war on Ukraine, and we wanted to degrade Russia’s economic and industrial capabilities. So we’ve always seen this as a long-term game.”

Insufficient results emerging from anti-Russian sanctions: CNN

Regarding the assessment of the US sanctions strategy against Russia, the US senior official told CNN that "the disconnect between early expectations and reality appears to stem from the fact that many US and western officials underestimated the sky-high revenues Russia would initially reap from rising oil prices, and the willingness of countries like China and India to continue buying Russian oil."

The US official also significantly noted that the US ally,  Saudi Arabia, also bought Russian crude "for use in its power plants, freeing up its own oil to sell to other countries."

Former State Department Director of the Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office, Jason Blazakis stated that “the United States underestimated it, and we were slow in actually starting to think about deploying sanctions against Russia's energy interests.” 

Blazakis added that "I think they [US] made that calculation that these sanctions would have heat and hurt the Russian economy very quickly, in ways they clearly misunderstood and overestimated.”