“Six months since the start of the SVO. And literally on the same day, the sanctions war of the collective West against Russia began.
But to be strict and punctual, I must say that, of course, this was not the start of a sanctions war at all, because back in the spring of 2014 there were already sanctions.
Therefore, from 2014 to 2022, we were also under sanctions. Some of them were removed or weakened, new ones appeared.
It turns out that sanctions are not something new for us.
Some say that after the Russian Federation came into being in 1992, we lived without any sanctions for quite a long time.
I have to disappoint such "optimists" because there were sanctions anyway. They just didn't advertise.
For example, the Jackson-Vanik Act, more precisely, an amendment that restricted or prohibited the supply of many goods that had potential military significance. The Soviet Union still existed when this law was passed.
The USSR collapsed, and these same amendments to the law continued to operate. They were canceled, I think, in 2012.
But these amendments were replaced by other things.
That is, there is no need to harbor illusions that we had a time when economic sanctions were not in effect against Russia - or against the USSR.
We should at least briefly look at the history of the Soviet period, and then we will see that there was not a single month, not a single year, not a single day for us to live without sanctions.
Then, however, it was called blockades, boycotts, embargoes and so on.
All this began, in fact, from December 1917.
The full video commentary by Valentin Katasonov can be viewed here.