Sanctions: peace, security and human rights
Why today's overlapping sanctions regimes are every trader's problem
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, sanctions stopped being a specialist concern. Within days the European Union adopted wave after wave of restrictive measures, customs authorities began checking whether payments were routed through sanctioned banks, and thousands of businesses - many of them SMEs that had never given the subject a thought - discovered that a single name on a list could halt a shipment overnight. Sanctions have only grown since. They are now a permanent fixture of international trade rather than a response to one crisis. This article steps back from the headlines to answer two questions that matter more the longer you trade: why do sanctions take the form they now do, and why are they so hard to comply with?
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