On 24 February 2022 – exactly a year since the date of this week’s Guardian Weekly magazine – Vladimir Putin unleashed his brutal offensive on Ukraine. As our senior international affairs correspondent, Emma Graham-Harrison, wrote in the following day’s Guardian newspaper: “The continent awoke to the shock of scenes it once believed it had left in the 20th century: helicopters strafing homes outside the capital, long lines of tanks ploughing ever deeper towards Ukraine’s heartland, roads choked with refugees, and civilians huddled in underground stations to escape bombardment.”
Much has been written since then about the state of the war and how it might end, but this week we focus on a key plank of the west’s response: the wide-ranging economic sanctions against Moscow that it was hoped would throttle Putin’s war effort.
