Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
The sanctions themselves are a long term threat, but the elite's fear of sanctions is immediate. The motivator in this case is not so much what the existing sanctions have already done as what the economic elite thinks they will lose if further sanctions are applied. Those losses would take time to be realized, but the economic elite are not going to wait for that to happen to make their position known. They don't want to respond to losses, they want to prevent losses, and they will apply whatever pressure they can muster to achieve that goal. How much pressure they can muster is another question, but I'd guess there's a whole lot of talk going on behind the scenes right now.

Comes back to that same question: Putin can't afford to "lose" in the Eastern Ukraine, but can he afford to directly antagonize the business oligarchs?
Dayuhan---he can---Russian internal power is built on four legs, 1) the military, 2) the security services, 3) oligarchs, and 4) the Russian mob and over all of this the Russian Orthodox Church---so it really it just a balancing game for Putin.