Russian President Vladimir Putin mocks global isolation

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine risks making President Vladimir Putin an international pariah, but he does not fear such isolation -- quite the contrary, experts say.

The attack on Thursday led the United States and its allies to agree on a "devastating" sanctions package against Russia, after Nato, EU and G7 leaders condemned the invasion and vowed to hold Moscow accountable.

"Putin is now recognised as THE most imminent threat to our system of Western liberal market democracy," said Timothy Ash, an emerging markets strategist at BlueBay Asset Management. Western leaders "feel totally let down and threatened by Putin", who has marked himself out as "the number one pariah" of the West, he added in a note to clients.

The result, said Comfort Ero, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group think-tank, is that Russia "is likely to find itself in unprecedented political and economic isolation for a long time".

Russia was already targeted with rounds of sanctions after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and after the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in 2020. But no measure seemed to have any effect on the Russian president, other than increasing his intransigence.

"For a year and a half the Kremlin has actively prepared for the fact that the West will impose the most severe sanctions possible," Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the R.Politik analysis firm, told AFP.

Russia has prepared itself, particularly by growing its foreign exchange reserves, which total about $640 billion. "Abundant currency reserves, the soaring price of oil and a low debt-to-GDP ratio will help Russia weather the immediate hit of the sanctions," said Oleg Ignatov, a Russia expert with the International Crisis Group.

"But in the longer-term, they will compound the country’s economic stagnation." Russia is one of the world’s leading producers of crude, which soared to levels not seen since 2014 after the invasion began.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday called on Europeans with "combat experience" to take up arms and defend Ukraine against invading Russian forces, adding the West was too slow to help his country. His dramatic call for help came as Russian forces were approaching the Ukrainian capital, with some units reportedly reaching the city’s northern suburbs.