> also the economists who claimed that sanctions would destroy the Russian economy. They had the opposite effect, for reasons that still remain somewhat unclear.

On what timeframe did they say that?

There’s a good argument they ARE working to that end, just not as fast as policymakers would like. See the RU economic weakness in September.

One can make a decent argument that the sanctions were insufficient as Russia is effectively a petrostate (now with industry on a war footing) and the sanctions largely avoided RU oil/gas. Also China took up the slack by buying whatever Russia was willing to sell, and in Russian currency which extended their runway.

Lastly, Russia predicted the sanctions as a response to their Feb 2022 invasion because similar things happened before, so they planned ahead and made themselves resilient to The US dollar financial system locking them out (the same way they made their internet resilient to foreign sovereigns potentially cutting them off.