A few days ago, The Financial Times published an interview with a Russian businessman named Sergei Pugachev. Once an ally of President Vladimir Putin, Pugachev owned shipbuilding and construction interests, as well as a bank. Indeed, he was once known as “the Kremlin’s banker.” But his bank collapsed a few years ago, and, in 2012, the government seized his two shipyards. Jointly valued at $3.5 billion by the accounting firm of BDO, they were sold to a competitor, the United Shipbuilding Corporation, for $422.5 million, according to the paper.

The chairman of United Shipbuilding at the time was Igor Sechin, one of Putin’s closest associates and the head of Rosneft, the state oil company. Russian businessmen, Pugachev complained to The Financial Times, had become nothing more than “serfs” in Russia. “Today in Russia, there is no private property,” he added. “There are only serfs who belong to Putin.”

And so it goes in Putin’s Russia.

I had been making inquiries, hoping to find out whether the sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe in the wake of Russia’s takeover of Crimea were working. The answer, I believe, is yes, but not necessarily in the way you’d think.

The first point to make is that the Russian economy has been in a downturn ever since Putin returned to power in May 2012. In recent months, that slide accelerated. Economic growth has flat-lined. The ruble is in free fall. Inflation is rising. More than $100 billion of capital is expected to flee the country this year. Most ominous of all, the price of oil — Russia’s primary asset, upon which the government depends to finance itself — has been dropping.