Serhiy Lyamets: What's wrong with sanctions. Three aspects
Sanctions in Ukraine have become not only a tool of punishment, but also a lever of politics. In his column, the journalist Serhiy Lyametsdiscusses why a mechanism that is supposed to strengthen the state is increasingly losing public trust.
At the beginning of the war, I ran the Sanctions Monitoring information portal for several months. Like the vast majority of Ukrainians, I regularly heard about new packages of sanctions and supported them fervently, but did not understand what exactly was going on. I wanted to understand the principles behind this process, as well as to make an inventory of war crimes and those involved in them, so that no one would be undeservedly forgotten at the end of the war.
At that time, there was no systematized information on this. It was only in 2025 that the NSDC launched a portal with a Register of all the sanctions ever imposed by Ukraine. And at the beginning of the war, only the War and Sanctions portal of the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) had appeared.
The "International Sponsors of War" section of this portal, as it turned out, existed without any regulation, as a purely volunteer project. For example, such large international banking groups as Raiffeisen and OTP first appeared and then disappeared. Later, the portal was taken down by agreement with international partners because it created unnecessary reputational risks for numerous European corporations. But during the time it existed, the portal was more likely to add candidates for sanctions, according to activists and the NAPC leadership. There was little data on actual sanctioned persons.
So, by and large, there was no systematized information about sanctions, and we had to manually find the facts we needed on the Internet. To give you an idea of the scale of the work involved, here are some facts: as of the end of August, the NSDC's register contains 33,357 sanctions actions against 12,091 individuals and 8,694 legal entities.
What conclusions have I reached? There is far more information, but no more order. One key point has remained unchanged since 2022: in the first month of working on Sanctions Monitoring, I came to the conclusion that this area was dominated by controlled and sometimes uncontrollable chaos. News and statements from the authorities contradicted each other. Perhaps that was the intention. Different agencies were learning to move "between raindrops", following the example set by the first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk. But no one was trying to bring the system to an ultimate order, so that it would work in only one direction, clearly understood by everyone.
For example, mutually exclusive decisions were made regarding holders of dual citizenship. Among these people, there were and still are holders of more than two million Russian passports and almost one million Hungarian passports. At different times, these people were called either "ours", Ukrainians, or traitors. At the same time, a bill on dual citizenship was being drafted, and finally adopted by the Verkhovna Rada in 2025. Similar contradictions were observed in other areas.
The sanctions mechanism has existed since the early Poroshenko years. The basic law was adopted in 2014, but it was too general. As is often the case, the implementers of the law were given a lot of room for creativity, so numerous versions of the ways to apply sanctions were created almost from the start.
At first glance, everything looked right. Sanctions allowed the authorities to strike instantly. With the outbreak of the full-scale war, sanctions turned into a tool of active counter-propaganda on the part of Ukraine. At the same time, it turned out that they were very effective in redistributing property and fighting political rivals. This is the main reason why they have gained considerable popularity as an instrument of applied politics. At the same time, there have been occasional discussions in the media that, if there is a strong desire, sanctions can be used to block a competitor's work.
Of course, it was impossible to separate "clean" decisions from backroom ones, as the motives and criteria for imposing sanctions on the selected defendants always remained behind the scenes. Until 2025, the very possibility of appealing against sanctions through the courts remained blocked, and this in itself hinted that mistakes and abuses were not ruledout. From above, all this confusion was covered with a thick layer of information statements that were supposed to discourage any desire to look deep into the black box.
Having realised that the chaos around sanctions was being maintained deliberately, I stopped working on the Sanctions Monitoring project. However, since then, my attention has been regularly drawn to the headlines, and I have been unwittingly analysing new nuances.
Recently, I was asked on a TV show to express my opinion on whether there will be problems with the sanctions mechanism. In my opinion, there are already problems (the mechanism is very "crude" and non-transparent),but – yes – Ukraine will face far greater difficulties in the future.
In addition, over several years of active use, the sanctions mechanism has become "worn out" and largely "devalued". By devaluation, I mean a significant loss of public confidence. Whereas at the beginning of the full-scale war, the population of Ukraine was enthusiastic about each new package of sanctions, today the public consensus is more likely to be disappointed.
Sanctions are not working as well as they could, and not only in Ukraine. In 2025, this becomes obvious even to a non-specialist. At the same time, those individuals and state bodies that approve these sanctions are being de-sanctified, and the previously sacred mechanism itself (in sociological terms) is increasingly becoming desecrated. Given this trend, sanctions will soon be banished from public use, as the mention of them will become a manifestation of political incorrectness.
Below, I will try to present my opinion on why sanctions are rapidly losing their popularity in Ukraine.
Aspect one
"Sanctions are not so much a legal or other kind of tool as a political one," said former Finance Minister Ihor Umansky recently.
I would like to add to the words of the esteemed expert. I absolutely agree that sanctions are not a legal practice but a political tool. But there is one more point.
Sanctions are a powerful tool of information warfare. They exploit one of the oldest mechanisms of the human psyche – the division of the world into "friends or foes". In order to survive and be effective, the human mind automatically separates everyone it meets into these two groups. It supports its own, even if they are wrong, and fights against others, even if their words and actions are right. This mechanism has long been used by politicians and propaganda. It can be said that the "friend or foe" divide is the foundation of any political structure.
From the outside, sanctions are designed to punish an "outsider" over whom the state has no power. It is a public gesture, a clearly articulated attitude. Punishment through the imposition of sanctions is rather conditional, it is more like recognising someone as persona non grata.
What would seem to be the point, then, if there are no practical consequences for the person under sanctions? Unless they risk coming to the country that imposed the sanctions or conducting business there (it is hard to imagine that a person in their right mind would decide to do so). It turns out that there is a point. It lies in the impact that sanctions have on the minds and emotions of society.
This is the core property of sanctions.
Let's move on. Sometimes sanctions have real consequences. I will illustrate this by using the analogy of a blockade. As you know, a blockade is a forceful restriction of the enemy's trade flows. This was, in particular, what Britain did to Napoleonic France and Germany during the World Wars. Like a blockade, sanctions are also often aimed at creating obstacles to financial flows or business relations. However, this is not a consequence of the sanctions themselves, but of the influence of the state that imposed them. It depends on whether it has enough naval forces to actually block the movement of ships.
The analogy is quite appropriate. In particular, the sanctions imposed on Russia and other countries are tied to the control of global financial flows by the United States, Europe and some other global players. The United States has a unique ability to control settlements within the dollar zone by "cancelling" players who violate the sanctions, for example, by conducting transactions with Russian or Iranian companies. In this sense, the US sanctions are a reflection of its geopolitical weight. Similar sanctions from, say, Burkina Faso would have no effect.
EU sanctions have the same power in areas where the EU is able to exert real influence. After all, it is the third most influential player in the world (after the US and China). This is why so much attention is paid to US and EU sanctions, unlike sanctions against Ukraine or Russia.
It is quite obvious that Ukraine does not have global dominance. In our case, sanctions have little practical impact on Russia itself. For Ukraine, sanctions are 90% an instrument of information influence. And only in relation to assets located in Ukraine, they can have longer-term consequences, including confiscation. However, again, this is a secondary feature of sanctions. The main feature was and still is the ability to influence the minds and hearts of the population.
I dare say that the main feature of sanctions in the US and the EU is the same. It is also an information effect. They are imposed not to solve the problem, but to influence the emotional attitude of voters. If this is not done, voters will conclude that the politicians at the head of the state are inadequate, ineffective and unnecessary. I would roughly estimate the information component at 70%, due to the greater influence of the US and EU on real economic processes (another 30%).
By announcing another package of sanctions against Russia, the official authorities of developed democracies are also fighting for the attention and loyalty of their citizens. They show that they are acting, that they hear their voters, that they take their emotions into account. We can safely say that sanctions are an informational, political tool for them, or even a propaganda tool, if you like.