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For the past 50 months, the West has steadily increased its sanctions on Russia. A conference in Kyiv on Sunday is analyzing which sanctions work and which don’t: sanctions rollback, accountability, the role of civil society, war profiteering, and Putin’s enablers.
This weekend, a conference called “Defunding, Disarming, and Isolating Russia’s War Machine” takes place in Kyiv. The organizer is B4Ukraine.
Euromaidan Press decided to become a media partner for the event, because this is an important topic. After the immediate rearming of Ukraine, perhaps the most important topic of all.
The conference this weekend will be looking at the evolving geopolitical context, the risk of sanctions rollback, the need for accountability, the role of civil society, and which sanctions have had a measurable impact on Russia’s war capacity.
This is a very black and white war: Russia invaded, no provocations, no ifs or buts, no gray zones. Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022—and a unanimous West condemned it and declared themselves 100% on the side of Ukraine.
In March 2022, the West—the EU and the Biden administration—imposed sanctions on Russia as a response to its invasion of Ukraine. The purpose of our sanctions against Russia were—in the words of the EU and the US government—to “change Russia’s behavior,” to “undermine Russia’s ability to continue the aggression,” and to “increase pressure on the Russian government to end the war.”
Both Joe Biden and Ursula von der Leyen used the expression that they wanted the sanctions to “diminish Russia’s economy” and “cripple its ability to finance the war.”
But here we are more than four years later—with millions of dead and wounded on both sides—and with no end to Putin’s invasion in sight.
It hurts to say it out loud, but—spoiler alert—our sanctions regime has clearly not worked.
And true, fair enough, nobody expected the sanctions to stop the war in 24 hours—but 50 months?
In the interdependent world of the 2020s, sanctions against an obvious, self-declared invader have proved to be an extremely difficult topic for the West to handle—politically, legally, morally, and concretely. With a lot of loopholes, deceptions, pretend, outright lies, and lots of “yeah, but…”
Over the next week, Euromaidan Press is bringing you a number of interviews with leading Ukrainian experts on these issues—what works, why and why not?—including a look at corporate complicity, war profiteering, and accountability.
The hope is that their analyses will make us all understand a bit better why Western sanctions have not stopped Putin. And—who knows—maybe there is a way to make sanctions more efficient?
Western naivety on Russia
Let’s begin with the beginning. Well, we cannot, because at the beginning we were asleep. By we, I mean the West.
The beginning of a Western sanctions regime on Russia should have been in 2008, after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Or, at the very least, the West should have implemented sanctions against the Putin regime in earnest in 2014—when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and Donbas. It is worth remembering that during the following eight years, 14,000+ people were killed, and two million Ukrainians were forced to flee their homes.
As we know, the West did not react much. It is difficult to find an observer who would argue that we have done well on this one.
But at that point, many Western political leaders still lived with the memories of the Russia of the 1990s, the Russia of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the Russia we hoped would finally become a civilized, European country, a partner. Some even believed that Vladimir Putin was the man to do that.
“I looked the man in the eye,” as US President George W. Bush said in 2001, “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.”
This naivety survived even Putin’s first assault on a neighbor—Georgia, in 2008. Invaded by Russia because they were well on their way to democracy and “Europe.” Nevertheless, in 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed a cordial “reset” of relations with Putin’s Russia. Within the next couple of years, it was exposed as a miserable policy failure.
Seen from 2026, it is perhaps difficult to fathom why we were so naive about Russia and Putin. I mean, the dude was a (former) KGB agent. But it is a fact that we were.
What is even more difficult is to fathom why it took us so long to wake up.
2014 sanctions: “Almost a joke”
As a result of this naivety, in 2014, as Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time, US President Obama and most Western leaders shied away from using the correct term—”invasion”—for what Putin was doing in Crimea and Donbas.
In 2014, our leaders constrained themselves to cowardly euphemisms like “violation of sovereignty” (Obama), “Russian violation of Ukrainian integrity” (German Chancellor Merkel), “illegal actions” (UK Prime Minister David Cameron), “an escalation of the crisis” and “military intervention” (EU).
It was therefore a surprise to no one that the Western sanctions on Russia did not make Putin leave Crimea or Donbas.
Some may remember US Senator John McCain’s response to George W. Bush’s words about looking into Putin’s eyes and soul. But “when I looked into Putin’s eyes,” concluded McCain, “I saw 3 letters: a K, a G and a B.“
In 2014, McCain called the EU sanctions “almost a joke” and asked Obama to come up with something better.
“We’re making it clear that there are consequences for their actions,” Obama promised. Yeah, not so much.
Sanctions 2022–26: Well…
Thus, March 2022 was in reality the beginning of earnest Western sanctions—after Putin had initiated a total invasion of Ukraine.
But if the goal and therefore test of sanctions was to stop Russia’s aggression in Ukraine—as identified by the EU leaders themselves in March 2022—the West has failed. And failed miserably.
As late as last week, after a particularly vicious nightly Russian missile and drone attack had killed 20 people around Ukraine and wounded 130.
Last week, EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas admitted that “Russia wants more war.”
Her conclusion, “So our response is more aid for Ukraine, more pressure on Russia,” is admirable. But it cannot hide that after 20 so-called “packages” of EU sanctions, Russia has not been stopped. Not at all. Our sanctions have failed.
Practically every day since the first sanctions in 2022, we have been reading about how the sanctions were biting in Russia and how Putin was in trouble, his economy about to collapse, the dictator himself about to be ousted. Tomorrow. Or soon. Or…
So far, all those loud pronouncements have turned out to be, at best, wrong, ill-informed guesses. (At worst, they are mere cheap self-promotion and hunting for “likes,” but that is a topic for another day.)
Often listening to so-called “experts” talk about the impact of sanctions has been like watching President Trump blabber about how quickly he would end the war in Ukraine—”soon,” “this year,” “by Christmas.”
But today—after 50 months of carnage—Russia is still occupying one fifth of Ukraine. And 2025 was, in fact, the deadliest year so far for Ukrainian civilians—2,500 people were killed—as Putin changed strategy and is now gunning for the civilian population and infrastructure. He did so in the hope that he could create chaos and make the Ukrainians tell their leadership to “stop, we have had enough, give the Russians what they want.”
Which is why Euromaidan Press so welcomes B4Ukraine’s conference this weekend—where painfully relevant and long-overdue questions will be addressed, including the increasing circumvention of our sanctions, and Western enablers of Russia. And what next?
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