Sanctions. How to understand them?
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Chief Specialist, Department of Sanctions and Strategic Export Control, Ministry of Foreign
A sanction or a restrictive measure is one of the many foreign policy instruments a state or an association of states uses to achieve a certain political change or to express a certain view.
The war waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine has brought along a change of paradigm in sanctions policy. Never before have so many sanctions been imposed so quickly against one country. As it is an existential threat to the existing world order, sanctions have not been limited to the traditional types of sanctions, but have been imposed on anything that can be agreed on within the EU.
In the context of Russia’s current aggression, one of the most innovative sanctions is the oil price cap, which has to solve several problems – reduce Russia’s revenues, but at the same time ensure stability in the global oil market.
When imposing restrictive measures, it is attempted to predict their impact on the offender, but when predicting those impacts, it has to be taken into account that the cultural, economic, political and psychological context of the target country is completely different. n most cases, the country subject to sanctions is a dictatorship with limited freedom of expression.
Information about Russia’s state budget, oil revenues and trade volumes may be available, but Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is not a rational economic undertaking. Therefore, we should not assume that once the Russian leadership realises that the aggression has become economically harmful, it will stop. It is likely that phenomena like cult, psychology, religion, ideology, mythology and many others have their role behind the aggression decision, and not economic considerations.
The attempt to evade sanctions is a kind of confirmation that the sanction has been appropriately planned. In December 2022, the European Union created the post of the EU Special Representative for Sanctions, whose task is, among other things, to prevent circumventing the trade sanctions via third countries (statistically, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, etc.), that is, to ensure the extraterritorial validity of the EU sanctions to as large extent as possible. As a rule, countries bordering Russia express readiness to cooperate in one way or another, but they also have their own considerations and dependencies relating to Russia.
The article expresses author’s personal views.