The sanctions regime imposed on Russia for its war on Ukraine is the most extensive in history, dwarfing all sanctions previously imposed on other countries combined.

While economic sanctions are seen as the most effective way short of direct military confrontation to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop the invasion, legal experts warn of ethical implications on how the sanctions affect the Russian people.

Since the Cold War, economic sanctions have become a preferred foreign policy tool that Western democracies use to force other countries to change policy. But while they have sometimes impoverished populations, sanctions have not always worked, raising questions as to whether they are justifiable.

Is it fair to put economic pressure on 146 million Russians for the choices of their leader?

"There is definitely that ethical dilemma, especially with such a massive sanctions regime," said André Bywater, a partner at Cordery, a legal compliance firm owned by Relx, which also owns Law360. "It's not just all the top people. It is affecting people throughout the system."

The sanctions regime imposed with unprecedented synchrony by the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and their allies is designed to create economic difficulties for Russia, including the ability to sell, electricity, oil and gas and import a wide variety of goods and services.

Long lists of oligarchs and big banks are the official targets, but sanctions are already affecting ordinary Russians as well. Prices for consumer goods have shot up. The lack of availability of certain products has spurred panic buying. It has become difficult to access certain medicines.


Bywater, who has lived in Russia and maintains connections there, said he has heard stories of people making trips to Finland to buy medications they can't find anymore.

"There's no direct ban on medicine. But there's just a general impact on trade, on distribution, supply chains, getting imports in and out of countries and so on," he said.

People with Visa and Mastercard credit cards are unable to use them, and since most Russian banks were cut out of SWIFT, the international bank messaging system, Russians have been unable to receive remittances from relatives abroad, money that has helped those living in poverty survive in an already stagnant economy.

Scholars and practicing attorneys say economic sanctions are permitted under international law.

The U.S. is acting under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, in which Congress gave the president the authority to level sanctions against entities that it deems pose national security threats, destabilize world regions or commit human rights abuses.

"There is a legal basis for this. It's not just the president who decides on any given date this is what he's going to do. He has to use that authority," said Robert J. Leo, a partner in the New York office of Meeks Sheppard Leo & Pillsbury LLP, a firm that focuses on U.S. and international law and regulations affecting exports and imports.

Stephen Giller, a prominent legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law, said the debate over whether sanctions are an appropriate response to the invasion of Ukraine is not a matter of legal ethics.

"You need a moral philosopher," he said.

Bruce Green, a legal ethics scholar at Fordham University School of Law, said the ethical aspects and underlying political and foreign policy judgments are intertwined — and hard to separate.

"I assume there is no question of legality, that sanctions comply with international law and our own law," he said. "The question is whether they are useful or whether they cause needless suffering to no good end."

"Might sanctions, while causing ordinary Russians to suffer, help serve our foreign policy and humanitarian objectives of ending the much greater, and entirely unjustified, suffering that the Russian government, acting through the Russian military, is inflicting on the Ukrainian people? If so, it is hard to say the sanctions are unethical," Green said. "Or do you know that sanctions are destined to be ineffectual, or that there is a way to achieve the same objective simply by targeting Putin and others in power? If so, you might say that economic sanctions are unethical because they cause suffering to innocent people that serves no good and necessary purpose."

Ultimately, it is up to elected officials to answer that question, he said.

Richard Nephew, a senior researcher at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs who served as the lead sanctions expert for the U.S. team negotiating with Iran during the Obama administration, said that analyses of previous sanction regimes show that they have worked about one-third of the time. He thinks that's not too bad.

"You can make an argument well, a third of the time, that's not very good. But then, thinking about other conflicts, can we honestly say that any other tool has worked better than a third of the time?" Nephew said.

It's difficult to predict whether sanctions will work, so the ethical calculations rest on a utilitarian argument: whether there are enough expectations of success achievable through use of sanctions, versus the alternatives, that will cause the least harm to the most people.

Alternatives to imposing sanctions — doing nothing or risking a war with Russia — are not ethically sustainable, he said.

"Can Russians and should Russians be massively inconvenienced and find life difficult as a result of their government's invasion of another country and killing hundreds and thousands of its people?" Nephew said. "I think they can be inconvenienced. If we come to a point where sanctions are imposing starvation-level consequences, that's a different thing."

He added, "Frankly, no one in Russia presently is impoverished, at least not as a result of sanctions."

In a 2015 post titled "The Humanitarian Impact of Sanctions" meant to address questions he received from one of his students at Columbia, Nephew said applying sanctions necessarily implies hardship for people.

"Pain is an instrumental part of the tool and, without pain, they are pointless," he wrote. "But, it should be mitigated where possible."

Since the war began, sanctions have targeted nearly 6,400 individuals and nearly 1,000 entities in Russia, according to data company Statista. Several sanctions have also hit Belarus for its role in supporting the invasion.

The speed at which sanctions continue to pile up is astounding, attorneys say. Since the European Union blacklisted its first round of Russian oligarchs, lawmakers and banks on Feb. 22, two days before the invasion of Ukraine began, new sanctions have been cascading almost every week.

Leo of Meeks Sheppard said the sanctions don't threaten the lives of Russians, but they do have an impact on their lives.

"The U.S. and the EU and the other countries have made it clear they're not trying to hurt the Russian people as a whole. These sanctions will have that effect, eventually," he said

The sanctions' toll on the Russian economy is being felt by subsidiaries and distributors that deal with some of Meeks Sheppard's clients, Leo said.

"They're not going to have work for people because they're not going to be able to get parts from Europe or the United States to build their machinery. They're not going to be able to get the flow of product that they were expecting before," he said. "Jobs will be lost."

But seen against a "totally unethical" war of aggression by Russia, the sanctions are "the only thing we can do short of going to war," Leo said.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev, a senior fellow for the U.S. Global Engagement Initiative at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, said the West's response — sanctions for Russia but also financial aid and military assistance for Ukraine — is meant to raise the cost of war to the point where it's no longer economically viable. That means prolonging the war.

Russia, on the other hand, is responding by controlling the export of certain commodities to cause prices to rise in the U.S., Europe, India and elsewhere to force an end to the sanctions.

"The thinking on this is very market-oriented," Gvosdev said. "Sanctions, counter sanctions, military assistance are all designed to raise costs. It really is framed in this idea of the market being the ultimate determinant."

Whether this strategy will work in convincing Putin that continuing the war is not worth it is a separate question, Gvosdev said.

The consensus among experts is that it is too early to gauge the overall impact of the sanctions on Russia and whether they will ultimately be effective. In the meantime, ethical questions remain.

"There are always ethical choices and ethical questions," Gvosdev said. "One is that you are seeking to impoverish people as a tool of compellence."

Ethical debates around sanctions largely focus on whether it is right to hold ordinary people accountable for the actions of their government.

The U.S. currently has sanctions in place on about 50 countries around the world, denying them access to the American market and financial system and putting restrictions on what they can buy from U.S. entities or sell in global trade.

One view is that since a majority of Russians support the war, the sanctions can be considered a legitimate form of pressure.

A different position focuses on the outcome, rather than the intent, of imposing the sanctions.

"Long drawn-out sanctions will cause a lot of problems, but may not actually lead to the outcome you're looking for," Gvosdev said. "Sometimes a very short, concerted military action, while it can be immediately destructive, is ethically better in the long run because then you can move to reconstruction."

But unlike Iraq, Libya, Serbia and other countries where the U.S. intervened militarily, Russia has an ability to use weapons of mass destruction. The risks involved in a military confrontation that could quickly turn nuclear raise moral red flags.

In the end, sanctions are seen as "the lesser of two evils," said Govsdev, who is also a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.

Another option — doing nothing — is also viewed as ethically unacceptable given the death and destruction brought on Ukraine without provocation, he said.

"We begin to track back towards sanctions as being, of a set of bad options, the least bad ethically in terms of doing something that may have an impact, but also limiting the risk of escalation," Gvosdev said.

Besides its impact on the Russian population, the sanctions regime gives rise to another ethical dilemma: whether the United States has a duty to help tamp down the economic harm the sanctions are causing to countries around the world, even if it means higher prices for Americans.

​​"At what point are the United States and Europe ethically required to do more to help other parts of the world that have been hit harder by the sanctions?" Gvosdev said.

That question will likely take center stage by mid-summer, he said.

Because they reach deeply into day-to-day life, the sanctions may have unintended consequences, like fueling massive waves of anti-West sentiment.

"A lot of people are turning against the West even more than they were already turned against us because of sanctions," Bywater of Cordery said.

Julian Cardenas Garcia, a professor and researcher at University of Houston Law Center, said the consequences sanctions have on trade and access to goods will affect the middle class and then lower classes, although not immediately. But he pointed out that the Russian people are already made poorer by their leaders' mismanagement and corruption.

While they may be extreme on the trade side, economic sanctions are not comparable to the use of force and are legitimate actions by sovereign nations, Cardenas said.

Sanctions do have an effect of forcing populations into poverty. Cuba, which has been under U.S. sanctions for six decades, is an example, according to Cardenas. But hardship cannot compare to the suffering of war, he said.

"You take a picture of Havana or Matanzas — there are people living there," he said. "Check the pictures of Mariupol these days."

--Editing by Jill Coffey.

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