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“The Russian economy is on its way to split in two,” Joe Biden said in March 2022, when he announced sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. “It is a blow against the Putin system at its core of power,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said of the sanctions. Liz Truss, her UK counterpart, predicted that Vladimir Putin’s oligarchs would have nowhere to hide and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said that sanctions were leaving Putin “without the ability to finance his war machine”.