Samantha Power

civilians in this way.

You can't try to take over a country just because you want to make your own country bigger.

That's not okay.

But it's been a reality check, I think, for a lot of countries and publics around the world who didn't realize it had gotten this bad.

when we were warning about the troop buildup on the other side of Ukraine, there were, you know, some countries within Europe that were questioning, you know, is that really true?

Would Putin really do it?

And it was kind of a little bit of wishful thinking in the sense of you don't want to have to impose those costs.

You don't want to do them also to the Russian economy.

I mean, nobody wants to, goes into, wakes up in the morning and says, you know, I want to inflict severe economic pain on another country.

Well, the invasion itself has produced a degree of unity and a willingness to go further than we have seen Europe ever be willing to go and to bear those costs potentially to their own economies, at least in the short term.

Certainly major questions now about their energy sources and energy prices.

Are those going to be up?

But they basically said what he is doing is intolerable.

And we are going to bear some of those spillover effects because we have to inflict a degree of punishment here in the hopes of getting him right now at the beginning, you know, it's only been going for less than a week, but to get him to step away from this reckless, devastating course of action.

And, you know, the kinds of steps that have been taken just in the last 48 hours go so far beyond

what most observers thought was conceivable for just the reason you say, this kind of mutually assured destruction, interconnectedness of the energy market and of our economic system at large.

But the SWIFT sanction is the most severe sanction that one can impose, you know, cutting off US citizens, European citizens' ability to do business with the Russian Central Bank.

That was something that until 48 hours ago, I think President Putin still thought he was going to be able to draw upon.

Again, what needs to happen is then the elites around Putin who also have an awful lot to lose from the severity of these unprecedented sanctions with so many countries behind them is that those elites need to chime in and do everything in their power to affect a calculus

that so far on Putin's part hasn't shown a lot of regard for the welfare of the Russian people.