http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118995/if-sanctions-against-russia-succeed-what-follows-putin

August 6, 2014

Vladimir Putin Might Fall. We Should Consider What Happens Next.

By Julia Ioffe @juliaioffe

In July, the United States and the European Union finally bridged their differences and slammed Russia with severe sanctions in the wake of the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The pincers and scalpels of the previous rounds were discarded; this time, it was whole industries—defense, finance, and energy—that were targeted, including Sberbank, Russia’s largest commercial bank.
If the first round of U.S. sanctions was met with ridicule among the Kremlin elite—Vladimir Putin’s gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov, sanctioned back in March, joked that what he likes in the United States is Tupac Shakur, dead since 1996—there’s not much bluster this time around. Now, Gennady Timchenko, who magically became a billionaire many times over since his old friend Putin came to power, is overcoming his allergy to the limelight to moan publicly about how he can’t go on vacation to southern France with his family or visit his 19-year-old son at university in Switzerland. “Our public opinion is given to underestimating them, but these sanctions are much more serious,” says Sergei Markov, a Putinist hawk who sits on the foreign affairs committee in the Russian Civic Chamber. “They’re not personal, they’re sectoral. So they’ll affect a fairly large number of people. Additionally, they will affect businesses that are most crucial to the Russian economy. And they’ll hit the population. Maybe it won’t be immediate, but it will happen.”