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The Caucasus Mountain range in Georgia is one of the great sights in the south of Europe. Towering peaks, higher than any in the Alps, rise up from green meadows and grassy hills covered in wildflowers. Winding roads thread through deep valleys, overlooked by ornate Orthodox churches and monasteries.
But when I visited recently, I found a sight of an unexpected kind. The roads here have become dominated by a very particular kind of traffic: enormous convoys of trucks, carrying all manner of goods towards Georgia’s northerly neighbour: Russia. When I travelled north towards the checkpoint of Lars – the only road into Russia – I encountered a long queue of trucks waiting to clear customs and pass across.
I had come here in search of an answer to a puzzle that’s been preoccupying me for some time. It began with a chart. This chart showed that after Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions were imposed by G7 nations, including the UK, the flows of certain goods to that country suddenly cratered, falling to zero. That went for the so-called “dual use goods” you could use to create a makeshift weapon or put into a drone, but also for the luxury goods banned from sale into Russia.
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The theory back then was that by starving Russia’s war machine of the parts it needed and by starving senior Russian businesspeople and officials of the Western luxuries they coveted, European states could cause economic damage even if they weren’t directly at war with Vladimir Putin’s state.
But the data told a subtly different story. While exports of those goods to Russia certainly fell to zero, they suddenly rose sharply to a host of Russia’s neighbours. All of a sudden, Britain was sending drone equipment to Kyrgyzstan; all of a sudden, we were exporting luxury cars to Azerbaijan, in numbers we had never come anywhere close to before. Things got odder when you…
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