In July, the United States and the European Union finally bridged their differences and slammed Russia with severe sanctions in the wake of the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The pincers and scalpels of the previous rounds were discarded; this time, it was whole industries—defense, finance, and energy—that were targeted, including Sberbank, Russia’s largest commercial bank. If the first round of U.S. sanctions was met with ridicule among the Kremlin elite—Vladimir Putin’s gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov, sanctioned back in March, joked that what he likes in the United States is Tupac Shakur, dead since 1996—there’s not much bluster this...