The Ukrainians have a term for the barrage of missile strikes they have landed on Russia’s oil and military infrastructure in recent weeks: they call them “long-range sanctions”.

In part this is gallows humour – a response to Russia’s grim euphemisms such as “special military operation”, the official term for an unprovoked war of aggression, occupation and acquisition that has cost so many lives.

But it’s also a mild jibe at the West, which loves to talk of using sanctions to penalise Russia’s mass-murdering imperialism. Sanctions in the formal sense mean restrictions on trade and finance intended to constrain Russia’s capacity to wage war and punish its decision to do so.

While the West’s official sanctions have had an impact on Vladimir Putin and his henchmen, it’s an open secret that they are widely evaded. Russian elites and industries may not legally buy luxury goods and high-tech components from the West, but mysteriously they still obtain them – and equally mysteriously, Western exports to central Asian countries bordering Russia have boomed since the sanctions were introduced.

By contrast, the “sanctions” Kyiv is imposing on Russian industry are more hard-hitting and far harder to dodge. They fly in at hundreds of miles an hour, tipped with a high explosive warhead, and no amount of legal trickery or shell company manoeuvring will let you negotiate with them.

What’s more, they’re working:........

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