From September 2020 until December 2022, I was living and working in Moscow. Life was relatively normal and calm until Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine and the start of what he called a “special military operation” on February 24, 2022. After that, sanctions began to pour in. In Western media, Russia was shown to be struggling to get by after the sanctions; grocery stores empty, lines for bread and sugar, essential goods in short supply. Russian media, on the other hand, downplayed the sanctions, saying Russia was stronger and doing better than ever before. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

At least in bigger cities life did not change that much under Western sanctions. Certain international companies no longer did business in Russia, officially, but replacements soon flooded the market. The most obvious example of this is McDonald’s being replaced by Вкусно и точка (Vkusno i tochka – Tasty, period). It wasn’t the same as McDonald’s, but it was close enough.