NO HEAVY LIFTING REQUIRED:

In the space of a single day, February 28, Vladimir Putin's "Fortress Russia" collapsed. The ruble plunged by about 30%, and Russian authorities closed all financial markets. Russians raced to ATM machines to withdraw as much money as they could, desperate to exchange it for anything that wasn't the ruble. Failing that, they stormed shops to buy whatever they could find before prices skyrocketed. [...]

Nonetheless, the contours of Russia's economic disaster are clear to see. In the days following Russia's invasion on February 24, a united West responded with sanctions far more severe than those it had imposed after Putin's annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine in 2014.

The most important sanctions have been financial. The United States has barred transactions with four of Russia's biggest state-owned banks; prohibited the trading of Russian sovereign bonds; limited the ability to lend to 13 major Russian companies; blocked key banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system; and, most important, frozen the Russian central bank's foreign-exchange reserves. In one fell swoop, Russia has been locked out of international finance. No Westerner will dare interact with Russian financial institutions for the foreseeable future.

Other sanctions have prohibited the export of about half the key technological inputs that Russia buys from US suppliers. And hundreds of Western technology companies - led by Apple - have declared voluntarily that they will stop doing business in, or selling to, Russia.

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