Why the enormous financial pain being inflicted on Russia worries some in the west

But some experts and analysts aren’t feeling triumphant. Instead, they’re worried. Worried that these sanctions will have collateral damage in Russia and beyond, potentially even hurting the very countries that impose them. Some even worried that the sanctions intended to deter and weaken Putin could end up emboldening and strengthening him.

“I’m concerned about the scale of this economic warfare,” Nick Mulder, a historian at Princeton and the author of “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War” told me in an email. “Economic measures to punish Russian aggression and to support Ukrainian defense are absolutely necessary. But Western governments should be very careful about which sanctions they impose next.”

He isn’t the only one concerned.

One former Obama administration official that worked on sanctions, who agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said the scale of the restrictions on Russia has been so huge and unprecedented — so its knock-on impact could be huge and unprecedented, too. The former official noted that Russia’s central bank, which had its assets frozen by the United States in a Rubicon-crossing move, had more assets than the entire economic output of Iran.