Anybody who thought that the sanctions were going to suddenly cause the Russian economy to collapse, that by putting these in place everything would just sort of immediately fall apart, would have had a mistaken belief back in 2022, but I would say that sanctions are a marathon and not a sprint, and over the course of the last three years, the sanctions have played an important role in degrading Russia's economy.
As I mentioned earlier, by narrowing Russia's options considerably, sanctions have caused inflation to rise. I also referenced the sovereign wealth fund, which they've had to draw heavily on in order to continue financing their war. They have pivoted their entire economy to a war footing. That means that other sectors of the economy are suffering. Is it completely degraded? No, but is it somewhat degraded? Absolutely. Should we continue working in that direction? Absolutely, and when I say we, I mean Canada, as well as all of our partners.
As I also referenced earlier, it's a bit like a game of whack-a-mole. You put sanctions on, and there's an immediate effort to try to evade them. Then we have to pile on more sanctions or measures to work to counter those evasion strategies as well, but the work, the coordination that is happening between Canada and its G7 partners on this, is unprecedented in nature.
We all have very different legislative systems and evidentiary thresholds. We've each built our own separate types of sanctions regimes, which means that you can't just press a button and it automatically goes out, but the work includes regular calls—I was on one this morning—around making sure that we're coordinating, sharing information, sharing evidence with one another and working to make everything as coordinated and effective as possible. It's definitely been an important factor over the last few years.