Putin Just Discovered the Limits of His Power

Source:Newsweek Date:09Nov2022

The article is about Putin, but it mentions Turkey helping Russia bypass sanctions twice.  Yesterday, head EU delegation tu Turkey told   BloombergHT that his office continues to  engage Turkish businesses to prevent sanctions violations by Russian entities.

However, the British think tank said that Turkey, which, along with Russia and the UN, was a guarantor of the deal, is likely to have stepped in as a powerful actor in part because Russia depends on the Turkish capital of Ankara to bypass sanctions.

Evghenia Sleptsova, senior economist at Oxford Economics, told Newsweek that the suddenness of the U-turn suggested that international pressure had been more persuasive than Russia’s motivation to weaken Ukraine.

She said the influence of Turkey and the Global South “must have been at work here” working as a “key broker of the deal.” The country had not joined in with Western sanctions and was serving “as a key re-export hub helping Russia to evade sanctions.”