THIS GUY'S GOTTA GO:

Putin's invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most far-reaching sanctions ever leveled on a large country, an unprecedented worldwide shunning whose eventual impact both on Russia and the global economy is still a matter of speculation. As the United States announced another round of sanctions on Thursday, President Biden reiterated at a NATO summit in Brussels that the goal was "to cripple Putin's economy and punish him for his actions."

The United States has led dozens of nations in an escalating series of moves to cut off Russia from the global economy while also targeting the personal wealth of Putin and the government officials and billionaire oligarchs who support him. Those sanctions -- and the voluntary move by hundreds of foreign companies, from McDonald's to Apple, to suspend their operations there -- are starting to inflict a toll inside Russia that experts said will continue to increase, ratcheting up the internal pressure on a still-defiant Putin to end the war.

That toll encompasses easily measurable effects like rising prices at the grocery store and the plummeting value of the ruble, as well as harder-to-quantify drawbacks such as an exodus of people like Skripko, a "brain drain" that could haunt Russia for decades.

"My expectation is it's going to get worse and worse and worse for a number of months," said Chris Miller, codirector of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. "Any sort of macro indicator you're going to look at is going to show a deep recession this year."

The Russian economy is expected to contract by 15 percent in 2022, a bigger year-over-year decline than the United States endured even at the depth of the Great Depression, according to a report last week by the Institute of International Finance (IIF), a trade group for the world's financial industry. Inflation in Russia is expected to rise by nearly 15 percentage points this year, almost double the decades-high rate the United States is experiencing right now, predicted the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group representing 38 nations with advanced economies.

And the International Energy Agency said on Thursday that Russia's oil exports -- the country's major source of income -- could decline by as much as 3 million barrels a day, roughly 38 percent of its prewar output.

The sanctions work at the highest levels of international finance and trade, including freezing most of the Russian central bank's assets held in foreign currency and barring several of its major private banks from the SWIFT global payments system. They've caused Russian interest rates to double to 20 percent, constraining companies and the government from purchasing vital materials and putting them at risk of defaulting on their debt.

But the effects also are designed to trickle down into the lives of average Russians. The sanctions are driving up the cost of everyday goods like groceries and medicine while depriving people access to foreign products and even their own savings as Putin's government set withdrawal limits for banks, seeking to stop money from leaving the country. Videos on social media have shown empty store shelves, shuttered foreign luxury-brand storefronts in malls, and customers scrambling to buy essentials.

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