By Dave Dahl

SPRINGFIELD – A University of Illinois expert in securities law and cross-border transactions says sanctions against Russia are not guaranteed to be effective.

And adjunct law professor Taisa Markus has a personal stake as a Ukrainian-American, adding she is “in awe of what the people in Ukraine are doing right now, and how the Ukrainians globally have really stepped up.”

Markus says cutting Russia off from the global financial community has been the most effective sanction.

“For the U.S., imposition of these sanctions are unlikely to result in energy shortages, because we are largely energy independent,” Markus says of oil and gas sanctions. “But this is a very different story for countries like Germany, which is very dependent on Russian natural gas.”

Can we blame the conflict for our own high gas prices? “We just had a pandemic. We have global supply chain issues. There are a lot of complicated and novel phenomena going on in the world right now,” says Markus.

Still to come, she says, are “secondary sanctions,” for example, the U.S. could boycott a bank which does business with Russia.

Dave Dahl can be reached at [email protected].