Not even the most farsighted policymaker in Moscow could have foreseen that Russia would go from a resource-rich, middle-income country, well-integrated into the world trading system, following its August 2012 World Trade Organization (WTO) accession, to the most heavily sanctioned nation on earth. Russia took that mantle from North Korea and Iran thanks to the decision of its President, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (1952, President, 2000-2008, 2012-), to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022. His pretexts — that Ukraine had no authentic history of being a sovereign nation; that the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union’s (EU) eastward expansionism toward and into Ukraine threatened Russia’s security interests, and it needed de-Nazification — were offensive poppycock to the entire international community.Following the November 9-10, 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine voted, in 1991, (via an August Declaration of Independence; a December referendum; and Presidential election in which 92% of Ukrainians favoured independence) not to integrate with Russia.2 By 1996, Ukraine transferred its entire nuclear arsenal to Russia in exchange for economic aid and security assurances; in December 1994, Ukraine joined the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapons state party.3 In contrast, in 2014, President Putin ordered the invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s southern territory along the Black Sea, Crimea. Ukraine’s President, the lawyer-turned-comedian Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (1978-, President, 2019-), was Jewish and several of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. Mr. Putin sought to rebuild the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), particularly, by rectifying what, from his perspective, was the most painful loss of all former Soviet Republics — Ukraine. After all, save for Russia itself, Ukraine was the largest (by population) and most industrialized Soviet Republic, as well as a vital producer of wheat. The Russian President simply could not accept that the Ukrainian people, following their March 2014 ‘Euromaiden Protest’ and consequent ‘Revolution of Dignity’, turned their back on pro-Russian authoritarianism and embraced a western style of democracy.The three-front attack by Russian forces — from the East, in the ethnic-Russian-Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk; from the North, via Belarus, which was run by an intensely pro-Russian autocrat, Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko (1954-, President, 1994-); and from the South, via Crimea — was supposed to conclude within 96 hours, with a clear Russian victory, thanks to three factors that did not happen. First, and most importantly, the Ukrainian people, led by President Zelenskyy, fought zealously to defend their country. Second, although NATO avoided direct engagement with Russian forces so as to avoid triggering a Third World War, it supported Ukraine in every other way possible, from lethal arms shipments and intelligence sharing, to humanitarian aid and refugee assistance.Third, not only the United States of America (U.S.) but also the United Kingdom (U.K.) and the EU, were quick to impose crushing sanctions on Russia. Other than China, and to a lesser degree India, Russia had few friends as it considered itself a pariah state.As for the American and Allied measures, they took the form of calibrated trade sanctions and export controls, applied across the first two-to-three weeks in advance of, and following, the February 24, 2022 Russian attack on Ukraine. The hope was that President Putin would behave as a rational actor and calculate that his escalation of war in Ukraine would be met with an escalation of sanctions against Russia, which would wreck the Russian economy. That hope was dashed, for such expectations of rationality and foreseeing of economic sanctions were not met.Rather, President Putin, who had been an officer in the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency, recalling he had to moonlight as a taxi driver to make ends meet after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, persisted in perpetrating violence. Those acts included committing war crimes against civilians in Ukraine and applying countermeasures against the US and Allied governments that were laughably (if that adverb is appropriate in wartime) redolent of the tit-for-tat behaviour of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Sino-American Trade War.Though there is no single or correct way to organize and categorize the Russian sanctions, it is fair to say that they occurred in multiple waves. They sent the international legal community into a veritable frenzy, as law firms across the globe struggled to help clients decamp Russia, and to avoid being hit themselves, with sanctions for collaborating with instruments of Mr. Putin’s war machine. These waves overlap and hence, are only roughly chronological. For instance, the identification and sanctioning of President Putin’s inner circle was a work-in-progress, taking months.Overall, the wave of sanctions provides a veritable clinic not only on the invocation and allocation of the U.S. 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and not only on nearly multilateral action (indeed, the likes of Japan and Singapore, both of which traditionally after the Second World War had been reluctant to draw hard, red lines in favour of deontological do-the-right-thing versus Utilitarian pay-attention-to-who-pays-the-bills), but also on a possible restructuring of international relations. Democracies united to fight tyranny, which had not been seen in the European Continent since the Second World War, as they appreciated that a threat to freedom anywhere can be a threat to it everywhere
