​​Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered Europe’s most dangerous war since World War II. In response, the United States and its allies have progressively rolled out the steepest sanctions regime ever levied against a G20 member state. The deployment of these sanctions has been an illustrative moment for international relations, reminding the world just how much the nature of warfare has changed in the 21^st Century.

The sanctions are a careful and calculated effort by Western allies to forcefully punish Russia for its attack on Ukraine without engaging in traditional means of warfare, namely deploying troops and risking an escalation of broader conflict. How the war in Ukraine progresses will show whether economic sanctions can be properly utilized by the US and its allies as an effective coercive tool to prevent a wider conflict between Russia and the West.

For states such as the US, which wield large financial power in the global system, economic sanctions have become a powerful weapon to punish or deter behavior deemed threatening to international peace and security. However, economic sanctions have a checkered past, with failures arguably outweighing successes. Sanctions were credited with helping to topple South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1980s, but sanctions against Serbia in the 1990s failed to stop Slobodan Milosevic’s invasion of Bosnia. Similarly, steep economic sanctions have failed to dislodge the authoritarian regime of North Korea or deter the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

The exponential increase in the US’s use of sanctions in the post-Cold War period has characterized a strategic shift in American foreign policy. Particularly following 9/11, the US has expanded the reach of its economic force by tailoring sanctions against specific individuals and organisations rather than just countries. Twenty-first century presidents have increasingly relied on this weapon, with Trump imposing more than 1000 sanctions on individuals and companies during his presidency and President Biden making it clear from the start of his administration that sanctions would remain a central instrument of US power. Levying sanctions to instigate change in the behavior of states without using military force has allowed the US to keep many conflicts at arm’s length.

In the current conflict with Russia, the US and its NATO allies have been clear that their use of economic sanctions is a means to avoid military escalation, which highlights a distinction between economic and traditional means of warfare. Should Russia seek to retaliate against Europe through economic means, it may have some reasonable leverage over the EU, specifically countries like Germany, which rely on the Nord Stream pipeline that runs from Russia into Europe for imports of oil and gas. However, Russia does not have comparable economic tools to retaliate against the US and may therefore have to rely on its advanced military and cyber-warfare capabilities if it chooses to escalate tensions with the US.

Given the stark difference in coercive tool sets available to each side, it is not clear that Russia will accept the West’s normative assumption that, because their attacks against Russia stay within the realm of economic sanctions, Russia should refrain from retaliating against the West with military force or cyber-warfare.

The US and its allies now dance the delicate line of ensuring that their onslaught of economic sanctions cause painful material consequences while advocating to Russia, and to the world, that aggressive economic sanctions do not merit a military or cyber escalation against the West.

To optimize the effectiveness of their economic sanctions, it has been important for Western allies to act in a concerted effort under the White House’s leadership in the early days of the war. After starting cautiously by freezing the assets of Putin and key members of the Russian government and elite, Western allies quickly moved to deepen their sanctions against Russian institutions as the invasion raged on. In addition to cutting off some of Russia’s largest banks from the US financial system, Western allies announced they would block Russia’s central bank from accessing its foreign reserves. Most notably, and after much negotiation, Western allies even agreed to cut off a select number of Russian banks from the SWIFT international payment system.

In doing so, the US and its European allies successfully struck at one of Russia’s greatest weaknesses: its currency. The value of the ruble has already fallen 30% against the dollar, greatly diminishing consumer purchasing power and generating widespread unease in Russia.

Although the US and NATO may view their sanctions as separate from direct military action, Putin announced on February 27 that he considers their moves an aggression against Russia and responded by placing nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty.” Soon thereafter, he went further and stated that Western sanctions are akin to a declaration of war, sowing doubt that a broader conflict can be avoided even if the West refrains from engaging in direct military action against Russia.

Despite the sharp consequences of economic sanctions resonating throughout Russia, and ongoing talks between Ukraine and the Kremlin, Moscow has continued to escalate its onslaught on Ukraine. Given that the war and violence has only worsened, Biden responded to bipartisan support for greater economic punishment against Russia by splitting from the pack of allies and banning Russian oil imports.

In response, on March 9, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated that the US is waging a “de facto economic war” and Russia could react with retaliatory actions. So far, no concrete statements or public actions have been made by the Kremlin indicating how it would retaliate against the US, but US officials have preemptively put Americans on high alert for Russian cyber-attacks.

The US has some of the world’s most sophisticated cyber weapons, as evidenced by Stuxnet, a computer worm that took out an Iranian uranium enrichment facility in 2010. However, Russia has proven its own strength through cyberattacks that disrupted Ukraine’s powergrid in 2015 and 2016. Russia and the US have frequently engaged in small scale cyberattacks against one another in recent years. In 2019, the US launched malware attacks on Russia’s power grid in response to Russia’s hacking of US plants. While the US’s development of such weapons have largely been devised to act as deterrents to greater escalation, there are no mutually agreed norms on the limits of acceptable cyber-warfare. 

Several intelligence and cyber security analysts believe that as the US and its allies continue to strangle Russia’s economy, the Kremlin’s statements that the West is waging its own war will be bolstered among the Russian public, and Putin could respond with large scale cyber attacks against Europe and the US. Biden has already stated that if Putin launches cyber attacks against the US he will be ready to respond. This may lead us into yet another facet of warfare in the 21^st century: one where Russia and the West may, once again, be on a more equal footing to fight each other directly, rather than in economic terms where Russia is at a clear disadvantage, or in direct military action, which the West seeks to avoid.

While the West, under the US’s lead, has shown that economic sanctions can pack a huge bite, it remains to be seen whether they are able to mitigate the escalation of violence or the expansion of conflict into new realms.