The US, the UK and the EU Secondary Sanctions Related to Russia: Comparative Analysis

Since 2022 the U.S., the UK and the EU have extensively used secondary sanctions against companies and organisations in third countries to bolster the policy of sanctions targeting Russia. Research literature provides numerous pieces on sanctions, however, it lacks empirical data on current use of secondary sanctions related to Russia. The aim of the article is to cope with this gap. What are the quantitative parameters of the U.S., the UK and the EU secondary sanctions? Do they have the same patterns? What countries are most affected and what are the reasons to impose restrictions? What kind of companies emerge in the lists of blocked persons under the policy of secondary sanctions? The main assumption implies that the U.S. must have a significant quantitative advantage in terms of numbers of sanctioned organisations, however, the patterns of sanctioning in terms of countries affected and other parameters must be the same due to alliance relations between the initiators' concerned. The analysis relies on quantitative dataset on the use of secondary sanctions, composed by the author. It reveals major differences between the U.S., on the one hand, and the UK and the EU, on the other, indicated by tremendous gap in numbers of sanctioned persons. However, all the three initiators of sanctions target mostly the companies from China, UAE and Turkey. Export control is a major trigger to use secondary sanctions. The "no name" companies compose the majority of sanctioned organisations in all the three cases.

sanctions, policy of sanctions, secondary sanctions, Russia, U.S., UK, EU