The amount of billionaires in Russia has increased by 22 people during the first year of the war. That’s while some of them dropped out of windows. Deripaska is one of those who benefited immensely, so for him everything is bloody amazing and he’d welcome even more sanctions.
A continent-spanning economy will always have a baseline level of self sufficiency.
On the other hand, without the sanctions, Russia might have enjoyed an economic boom over the past couple of years, strengthening Putin’s hand further. Preventing that seems like an acceptable outcome for the sanctions, even if they failed to provoke an economic collapse as some Western leaders had hoped.
Honestly, the sanctions were needed even without the war and more than half of it would happen organically over the next decade or two (talking about the EU, not sure about the rest). Russia just opted for a speed run.
Deripaska has lost a lot of wealth in the last decade. He has hit all time low in 2022. But his wealth is finally recovering and has increased by 50% for 2023. Yeah, he’s having fun, all’s good for him.
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