Sanctions have another effect. That effect is the screwing up Russian ability to make more weapons. More anything to be honest but weapons is the key. Missiles, tanks, drones and so much more need stuff from the West. Now of course Russia is willing to pay smugglers massive amounts of money for stuff that has been blocked but there are limits to how successful these attempts can be and without these key components all sorts of Russian military hardware is going to be impossible to make.
We're seeing the results of this in the mix of missiles used. At the start it was mostly "smart" modern ones, then these were combined with adequate late soviet ones (1980s vintage) and now we're seeing ancient 1960s era stuff being used. That works fine if you just want to destroy things (which seems to be part of the Russian strategy) but it doesn't really stop Ukraine from fighting back and it certainly suggests that in another month or two Russia may simply be out of missiles all together.
Note that even in good years pre-sanctions, Russia could only make about 2 smart missiles a day across all the modern systems. With sanctions it's probably unable to make even one per day. Russia can and has been using up a years worth of production of these in under a week (and that ignores the ones lost in "smoking accidents"). Just stopping those imports massively helps the war effort
Sanctions have another effect. That effect is the screwing up Russian ability to make more weapons. More anything to be honest but weapons is the key. Missiles, tanks, drones and so much more need stuff from the West. Now of course Russia is willing to pay smugglers massive amounts of money for stuff that has been blocked but there are limits to how successful these attempts can be and without these key components all sorts of Russian military hardware is going to be impossible to make.
We're seeing the results of this in the mix of missiles used. At the start it was mostly "smart" modern ones, then these were combined with adequate late soviet ones (1980s vintage) and now we're seeing ancient 1960s era stuff being used. That works fine if you just want to destroy things (which seems to be part of the Russian strategy) but it doesn't really stop Ukraine from fighting back and it certainly suggests that in another month or two Russia may simply be out of missiles all together.
Note that even in good years pre-sanctions, Russia could only make about 2 smart missiles a day across all the modern systems. With sanctions it's probably unable to make even one per day. Russia can and has been using up a years worth of production of these in under a week (and that ignores the ones lost in "smoking accidents"). Just stopping those imports massively helps the war effort