Sanctions on Russia’s businesses haven’t worked

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western governments implemented a suite of sanctions on Russian businesses, escalating the sanctions they implemented following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. However, new research from Clinical Associate Professor Alex Settles, based on the years following the Crimean annexation, reveals that the Russian sanctions only temporarily hurt targeted firms. 

The findings suggest that a major tool in the diplomacy toolkit – economic sanctions – do little to deter or reverse aggressive actions by other countries.

“We initially thought this research was going to show that the Russian sanctions worked,” Settles said. “But once we analyzed the data, we started seeing what we saw on the ground, which is there did not seem to be long-term negative impacts from these economic sanctions.”

Read more about this research from UF News.