Within hours of Russia’s full‑scale invasion on February 24, 2022, President Biden announced a major sanctions package targeting Russia’s largest banks, state‑owned enterprises and high‑tech imports, developed in coordination with the EU, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others, and explicitly aimed at severely degrading Russia’s economy and military‑industrial capacity over time.(rollcall.com)(observerbd.com) U.S. officials had repeatedly framed the planned response as the “most severe sanctions ever” and as intended to be crippling if Russia invaded, and Biden’s post‑invasion package followed that playbook rather than a gradual approach.(news.wjct.org)(wqln.org) Major Western media contemporaneously described Biden’s February 24 measures as “new crippling sanctions” and said they were “aimed at crippling the Russian economy,” underscoring that they were broadly perceived and labeled as crippling in intent.(newsbusters.org) In parallel, U.S. allies rapidly implemented coordinated financial and export‑control measures, and within days the EU and partners moved to cut key Russian banks from SWIFT, all as part of a wider Western effort to impose heavy, punitive economic costs on Russia for the invasion.(rollcall.com)(en.wikipedia.org) Because Biden and multiple Western allies did in fact announce and begin implementing severe, widely described-as-crippling economic sanctions in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Chamath’s prediction is best judged as right.