On February 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Western governments began assembling the most comprehensive sanctions package ever imposed on a major economy. Within weeks, they had frozen $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves, expelled Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging system, imposed export controls on advanced technology, and sanctioned hundreds of Russian officials, oligarchs, and companies.
It was, by every measure, an unprecedented economic response. And by the end of 2022, Russia’s economy had contracted by approximately 2.1 percent — less than the contraction the United States experienced during the 2008 financial crisis. By 2023, the Russian economy had returned to growth. The war continued. The sanctions had not stopped it, had not ended it, and had not produced the economic collapse that some Western officials had predicted would force a Russian withdrawal.
This outcome surprised people who had not been paying attention to the history of sanctions. It did not surprise people who had.
The Tool That Rarely Does What It Claims
Economic sanctions — restrictions on trade, finance, or investment imposed by one country or group of countries on another — have been a standard instrument of foreign policy for over a century. They are imposed with stated goals: to change a government’s behavior, to punish human rights violations, to prevent weapons proliferation, to signal disapproval of an action the international community cannot or will not address militarily.
The academic research on whether sanctions achieve these goals is extensive and largely consistent. A landmark study by economists Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, and Kimberly Elliott, first published in 1990 and updated multiple times since, examined over 200 cases of sanctions use and concluded that sanctions achieved their stated objectives in roughly 30 percent of cases — and that this figure was generous, including cases where the causal relationship between the sanctions and the outcome was ambiguous.
Subsequent research has been more skeptical. Studies using more rigorous methodologies have found success rates closer to 5 to 10 percent for comprehensive sanctions aimed at major policy changes. The cases where sanctions clearly worked — South Africa, Libya’s nuclear program, Iran’s 2015 nuclear agreement — share characteristics that most sanctions regimes do not possess.
Why Russia Survived
The Russian experience after February 2022 is a case study in sanctions evasion at scale — and in the structural limitations of economic pressure against a large, commodity-rich economy with determined allies.
Russia redirected its oil exports from Europe to Asia within months. India became one of the largest buyers of discounted Russian crude, processing it and in some cases re-exporting refined products to European markets that had sanctioned Russian oil. China absorbed Russian energy and provided consumer goods that Western export controls had restricted. Turkey became a transshipment hub for sanctioned goods moving in both directions.
The parallel economy that emerged was not hidden. It was reported, documented, and analyzed in real time. The sanctions architecture had significant gaps — either by design, because key countries declined to participate, or by enforcement failure, because the transactions were structured to be technically compliant while economically circumventing the restrictions.
Russia also benefited from commodity price increases that the sanctions themselves helped cause. By restricting Russian energy exports to Europe, Western sanctions drove up global energy prices — increasing the revenue Russia earned on the exports it was still able to make. The tool designed to impoverish Russia partly financed its war.
The Iran Lesson Nobody Learned
Iran has been under some form of US sanctions since 1979 — forty-five years. The Islamic Republic has survived every sanctions regime imposed on it, adapted its economy around the restrictions, developed domestic industries to substitute for sanctioned imports, and built evasion networks sophisticated enough to move oil, weapons, and money across the most heavily monitored financial system in the world.
The one moment when sanctions appeared to work — the negotiations that produced the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — was not actually a case of sanctions forcing Iranian capitulation. It was a case of a specific Iranian government, led by President Rouhani, choosing to negotiate because it calculated that a deal served Iranian interests. When the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and reimposed sanctions, Iran did not capitulate again. It resumed nuclear enrichment and accelerated it.
The lesson the Iran case offers is not that sanctions work given enough time. It is that sanctions can create conditions in which a government that wants to negotiate has a justification for doing so. They cannot create the will to negotiate where it does not exist.
Who Actually Pays
The most consistent finding in sanctions research is that the costs of economic sanctions fall disproportionately on civilian populations rather than on the governments and elites whose behavior the sanctions are designed to change.
Governments under sanctions prioritize maintaining their own position. They do this by controlling access to scarce resources — ensuring that loyalists, military personnel, and essential regime support networks are protected from the worst effects of economic restriction, while the general population absorbs the shortages, price increases, and reduced public services that sanctions produce.
The evidence from Iraq in the 1990s is the most documented case. UN sanctions imposed after the 1990 Gulf War remained in place throughout the decade, producing documented deterioration in nutrition, healthcare, and child mortality among the Iraqi civilian population. Saddam Hussein’s government survived intact. Its officials did not go hungry. The sanctions did not change the regime’s behavior on the issues that had triggered them.
Similar patterns have been documented in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Sudan. The populations of sanctioned countries suffer. The governments of sanctioned countries adapt. The policy continues because abandoning it would be politically costly for the governments imposing it, regardless of whether it is achieving its stated objectives.
The Smart Sanctions Experiment
The failure of comprehensive sanctions to change government behavior without devastating civilian populations produced, in the 1990s and 2000s, a turn toward “targeted” or “smart” sanctions — measures designed to restrict the assets and travel of specific individuals and entities responsible for the behavior being sanctioned, while minimizing impact on the broader population.
The theory was sound. The practice has been less impressive. Targeted sanctions lists have grown to include thousands of individuals and entities, reducing their precision. Designated individuals routinely transfer assets to family members, business associates, and shell companies before designations take effect — or after, through intermediaries who are not themselves designated. The financial investigation required to follow these transfers is resource-intensive, and enforcement capacity has not kept pace with the creativity of evasion.
More fundamentally, targeted sanctions impose costs on individuals who may already have accumulated enough wealth to absorb them without changing their behavior. A Russian oligarch who has moved his assets to Dubai or Abu Dhabi before a sanctions designation is inconvenienced, not transformed. The lifestyle adjustment required by a travel ban is modest for someone with a private aircraft and multiple residences.
When Sanctions Do Work
The cases where sanctions have contributed to genuine policy change share a consistent profile. The target country is economically vulnerable and trade-dependent. The sanctioning coalition is broad enough to prevent easy evasion. The sanctions are paired with a credible diplomatic off-ramp — a specific behavior change that will result in sanctions relief. And the target government contains factions that want to negotiate and can use the sanctions as justification for doing so against internal hardliners.
South Africa in the 1980s met most of these criteria. The apartheid government was increasingly isolated internationally, the South African economy was deeply integrated with Western financial markets that were being closed to it, and there were significant factions within the white political establishment that recognized the system was unsustainable. The sanctions accelerated a process of internal reckoning that had already begun.
Most sanctions regimes do not meet these criteria. They are imposed on governments that have made the calculation that the behavior triggering the sanctions is worth the economic cost, that have access to alternative economic partners, and that face no credible military threat that the sanctions are designed to substitute for.
The Political Economy of Persisting With a Failed Tool
If sanctions rarely work, why do governments keep using them?
The answer is political, not strategic. Sanctions are the foreign policy tool that allows governments to demonstrate that they are doing something without committing to the costs of doing something effective. They are domestically popular — punishing a foreign adversary feels satisfying to publics that want their government to respond to an outrage. They are diplomatically easier than military action. They create the appearance of pressure without requiring the commitment of resources that actual pressure would demand.
The gap between what sanctions are supposed to do and what they actually do is tolerated because closing that gap would require either abandoning a policy that looks decisive or escalating to measures that carry real costs and risks. Neither option is politically attractive. So the sanctions stay in place, the behavior they were designed to change continues, and the civilian population of the sanctioned country pays the price for a policy that was never really designed for their benefit.
The most honest description of how sanctions are used in contemporary foreign policy is not as an instrument for changing behavior. It is as a substitute for having a strategy — a way of registering objection to actions that powerful governments have decided they cannot or will not address through means that might actually work.
That is a harsh verdict. The evidence, accumulated across a century of sanctions use and decades of academic research, does not leave much room for a gentler one.
If this analysis interests you, read next: Why Ceasefires Fail: A Pattern Nobody Talks About