Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion has changed everything. Analysts in the West did not expect the war to go like this. They thought Ukraine would fold and that Russian forces would roll into Kyiv. Then, after the fact, the West would apply punishing economic sanctions and eventually force Russia to accept some modified version of the Minsk agreement, which was signed in 2015 and supposed to end fighting between Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbas region.
How hard they expected those sanctions to be is difficult to gauge from the lurching and seemingly haphazard manner in which the economic measures have escalated. Joe Biden’s announcement of US sanctions on Thursday 24 February was limited and clearly constrained by resistance from Europe — probably from Germany and Italy.
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