There has been an unprecedented increase in the number of sanctions imposed in world over the past 70 years, raising questions over their effectiveness. This column uses the fourth release of the Global Sanctions Database to quantify the impact of the 2022 sanctions on Russia on the country’s trade. The authors find that the sanctions have decreased Russia’s trade with sanctioning states but with very heterogeneous effects, especially across the EU. More importantly, however, they find evidence of significant trade liberalisation between Russia and third countries that have mitigated and may even eliminate the negative primary trade effects of the sanctions.
“Sanctions are now a central tool of governments’ foreign policy”
The Economist (2021)
The unprecedented increase in the number of sanctions that have been imposed in the world over the past 70 years (see panel (a) of Figure 1) has been accompanied by significant interest from academics and policymakers alike. It has also led to the development of new databases to identify the various dimensions of economic sanctions and account for their evolution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the burgeoning literature has focused on assessing the impact and effectiveness of 2022 sanctions on Russia triggered by its invasion of Ukraine. Studies have studied the trade disruptions caused by sanctions (Egorov et al. 2024), the decline in Russian oil exports (Hilgenstock et al. 2023), the broader economic strain on Russia’s energy sector (de Souza et al. 2024), the challenges of coordinating sanctions internationally (Ghironi et al. 2024), and the exit strategies of US firms from Russian markets (Balyuk and Fedyk 2023). 1
Against this backdrop, in a new paper (Yalcin et al. 2025) we make three contributions to the literature. First, we introduce the fourth edition of the most comprehensive sanctions database – the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB), originally built by Felbermayr et al. (2020a, 2020b). Second, we quantify the effects on trade between Russia and the countries that have imposed sanctions on it since 2022 in response to its conflict with Ukraine. We find that the sanction effects on trade were negative but also quite heterogeneous across the senders of sanctions, even across the EU member states. Third, in addition to estimating the primary sanction effects between senders and Russia, and going beyond the standard trade diversion effects, we find that Russia has liberalised its trade with several non-sanctioning countries, including Turkey, India, and China. These findings help explain the inefficacy of the 2022 sanctions on Russia and point to the possibility that, by stimulating a stronger relationship between Russia and its allies, the 2022 sanctions may have contributed to furthering geopolitical fragmentation in the world.
The Global Sanctions Database – Release 4
The GSDB-R4 adds 223 new sanction cases to the previous release of the data for a total of 1,547 cases that were imposed between 1950 and 2023. The additional sanctions in GSDB-R4 primarily reflect evolving geopolitical conflicts, particularly the unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Similar to the previous editions of the GSDB, the fourth release distinguishes between six types of sanctions (trade sanctions, financial sanctions, travel sanctions, arms sanctions, military assistance sanctions, and other sanctions), nine political objectives (policy change, regime destabilisation, end territorial conflict, war prevention, end war, terrorism, human rights violation, restoration of democracy, and other objectives), and five categories of success (total success, partial success, negotiation settlement, failure, and ongoing). To ensure comprehensive coverage, multiple raw data sources have been utilised and thoroughly studied. In addition, the GSDB-R4 has been compared and cross-referenced against various sanctions data sets.
Panel (a) of Figure 1 displays a steady rise in sanctions since the mid-20th century. It also captures the sharp increase in sanctions in the last few years. Specifically, from 2021 to 2023, sanctions recorded their largest year-on-year increases, with active sanctions rising by 31.2% in 2021, followed by a 25% increase in 2022, and an additional 23% increase in 2023 (see panel (b) of Figure 1). This surge, which is among the most significant in decades, was driven by escalating geopolitical tensions around the world (van Bergeijk 2022) and, in particular, the new sanctions on Russia.
Figure 1 The evolution of the number of sanctions over time
Notes: This figure is constructed from the GSDB-R4. Panel (a) illustrates the number of all active sanctions (dark solid line), all pre-existing minus terminated sanctions (blue dashed line), and newly imposed sanctions (red solid line, which is equivalent to the distance between the dark solid and blue dashed lines) in each year (1950-2023). Panel (b) presents the year-over-year percentage changes in the number of all active sanctions.
To depict the current landscape of the sanctions on Russia, panel (a) of Figure 2 provides a map of the countries that sanctioned Russia in 2023, categorised by the number of sanction regimes. While Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East imposed no sanctions, the US assumed leadership in this process. Within Europe, some states only imposed or aligned with the EU sanctions, while others (e.g., Poland and the Czech Republic) opted for additional unilateral measures (such as the ban on coal imports by Poland).
Figure 2 The evolution of the sanctions on Russia
Notes: This figure is constructed from the GSDB-R4. Panel (a) presents a world map highlighting the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia in 2023. The map uses a color-coding scheme to represent the number of sanctions regimes in place: green for one sanction regime, blue for two to three regimes, yellow for four to six regimes, orange for seven to nine regimes, and red for ten or more regimes. For better readability, we zoom in on Europe. Panel (b) features a stacked bar plot where the height of each bar indicates the total number of sanctions against Russia in a given year. The blue segments of the bars represent existing sanctions, while the red segments denote new sanctions imposed within that year.
Panel (b) of Figure 2 tracks the evolution of the sanctions on Russia since its annexation of Crimea. While a large number of sanctions were imposed in 2014, the additions to this number remained limited until 2022, the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Subsequently, the number of sanctions surged. In 2022 alone, 25 new sanctions regimes were enacted, bringing the total to 38. By 2023, additional trade and targeted sanctions brought the total number of sanctions that were imposed on Russia to 56, marking the highest level yet.
The primary effects of the sanctions on Russia
Capitalising on the new GSDB-R4, in combination with international trade flow data from the IMF’s Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) and the Comtrade Database of the United Nations, we relied on established developments in the empirical trade literature (Larch et al. 2025) to specify an econometric gravity model capable of estimating the effects of the 2022 sanctions on Russia’s trade across various dimensions.
Our results reveal that the 2022 sanctions on Russia reduced its trade with sanction senders significantly. However, the primary effects of the sanctions were not very large (about a 25% reduction in trade with the senders on average). Moreover, these effects were very heterogeneous across senders. As can be seen in Figure 3, the sanctions imposed by the US and Canada had the strongest negative effects on trade, while the impact of sanctions imposed by the EU, Norway, the UK, Switzerland, and Japan was weaker.
Figure 3 Estimates of the effects of the 2022 sanctions on Russia’s trade with senders
Notes: Panel (a) visualises the effects of the sanctions on Russia on trade with each of the main senders of sanctions, while panel (b) visualises the effects of the sanctions on Russia on trade with each of members of the European Union. The estimates in both panels are obtained from a structural gravity model. For details see Yalcin et al. (2025).
We also zoom in on the effects of the sanctions that were imposed by the EU. Our country-specific estimates, which appear in panel (b) of Figure 3, indicate that they vary significantly across member states. Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Poland have experienced the largest negative and statistically significant effects. In contrast, the impact on Austria, Estonia, Greece, and Ireland appears to have been insignificant. Notably, Latvia and Malta have exhibited positive post-sanction effects on their trade with Russia, with the impact on Malta being particularly large. This result aligns with media discussions suggesting Malta’s relatively lenient stance toward Russia (Baczynska 2023).
Sanctions as a catalyst for trade liberalisation and geopolitical fragmentation
One of our most interesting and potentially important findings is that Russia’s trade with several of its large trading partners (specifically, China, India, and Turkey) has increased beyond the standard (and expected) trade diversion effects. Specifically, as in Kwon et al. (2022, 2024), who evaluate the extraterritorial impact of the US sanctions on Cuba, we estimate the change in the direct bilateral trade costs between Russia and the three countries noted above that did not sanction Russia. The main results from this experiment are reported in Figure 4.
Figure 4 The effects of sanctions on Russia’s trade with senders and third countries
Notes: This figure visualizes the effects of the sanctions on Russia on trade with each of the main senders of sanctions and three outside countries, including China, India, and Turkey. The estimates are obtained from a structural gravity model. For details see Yalcin et al. (2025).
Two salient messages stand out from Figure 4. First, from a methodological perspective, and consistent with the conclusions of Kwon et al. (2024), our new estimates suggest that not accounting for possible extraterritorial effects between the target state and third countries can lead to significant biases in the estimates of the primary effects of sanctions. This can be seen by comparing the estimates for the senders between panel (a) of Figure 3 and Figure 4, where one can see that the estimates for the UK, Switzerland, and Japan are not distinguishable from zero.
Second, and even more importantly with regards to the effectiveness of sanctions, Figure 4 reveals that, even after controlling for all possible trade diversion effects – achieved through the use of country-time fixed effects in the econometric model – the direct bilateral trade costs between Russia and Turkey, Russia and China, and Russia and India have fallen significantly. For example, the estimate of 0.88 for trade between Russia and India implies that, all else equal, trade between these two countries more than doubled right after 2022.
While we cannot identify separately the impact of the conflict itself from the impact of the sanctions, the important message is that the crisis in Ukraine induced Russia to liberalise its trade with China, India, and Turkey beyond the expected trade diversion effect, as if these countries signed trade liberalisation agreements. The implication of this result is that, in combination with trade diversion effects, the recent reduction in bilateral trade costs between Russia and third countries further mitigate the negative impact of the sanctions on Russia; so much so that these sanctions may have even improved Russia’s welfare due to gains from trade. From a broader geopolitical perspective, our results point to the possibility that sanctions may serve as a catalyst for stronger geopolitical fragmentation in the modern world.
Source : VOXeu
