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Moscow is poised to lose 200,000 jobs as Russia’s economy reels amid Western sanctions over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the city’s mayor said on Tuesday.
The potential job losses come as Putin tries to downplay the impact of the sanctions, declaring on Monday that NATO’s “economic blitzkrieg strategy hasn’t worked. In addition, the initiators themselves could not get away with the sanctions.”
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Sanctions against the Russian economy have only been tightened in recent weeks after alleged war crimes by the Russian military in Ukraine were uncovered.
WARNING, GRAPHIC IMAGE: Bodies unearthed from a mass grave in Bucha, Ukraine. Image courtesy of Senator Steve Daines Office. (Image courtesy of Senator Steve Daines Office.)
PUTIN TELLS RUSSIAN MOTHERS ‘I UNDERSTAND YOUR CONCERNS’ DURING INVASION OF UKRAINE.
Despite Putin’s confidence, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin sounded the alarm for the Russian capital on Tuesday.
“According to our estimates, about 200,000 people are at risk of losing their jobs,” Sobyanin wrote in an official blog post, according to a translation of Business Insider.
President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders have pointed to signs of weakness in Russia’s economy since sanctions began. The Russian ruble had lost nearly half its value by the second week of March, less than a month after the Russian invasion.
Still, some Western experts say that despite the weakened state of Russia’s economy, the sanctions campaign is not having the desired effect on Russia’s economy.
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“We’ve been driving oil prices up with half measures that haven’t met our goals,” Rich Goldberg, an advisory board member to the Vandenberg coalition and a member of the White House National Security Council, told Fox News Digital in March. “Sanctions need to be tailored to each situation in order to have the desired effect and achieve a specific outcome. Not all sanctions are the same. Not all sanctions are created equal, and not all situations deserve the same type of sanctions response.”