Between February 22, 2022, and January 11, 2024, territories and organizations worldwide imposed over 16,000 restrictions on individuals from Russia. Furthermore, roughly 9,300 list-based sanctions were placed on entities over that period. The sanctions were first placed due to the country's recognition of the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR) and then due to its military attack on Ukraine. Restrictions targeting individuals typically include asset freezes and travel bans. Sanctions on Russia prior to the war in Ukraine Over the past decade, Western countries have placed restrictions on Russia for various reasons. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and Sevastopol, the EU restricted entry to several individuals and froze assets of companies allegedly responsible for undermining and threatening Ukraine's territorial integrity. Furthermore, the EU and the U.S. sanctioned several persons and companies in relation to human rights violations and the use of chemical weapons, referring to the poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Alexei Navalny. In addition, the United States imposed measures on Russia over its malicious cyber activities and evading United Nations (UN) sanctions restricting trade and financial transactions with North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela.

Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries’ overall economic costs tend to be low. We argue that, despite this, sanction costs can force governments of these countries to reallocate budget resources from low-priority spending categories to others in an effort to minimize governments’ political costs. One such low-priority category is disaster preparedness and mitigation. We show that economic sanctions lead to reduced disaster preparedness spending and, as a result, increase the scale of economic and human losses generated by natural disasters in sanctioned countries.

Switzerland manages a sanctions lists with a high degree of detail on the individuals that are subject to it's embargoes

Assets of the Central Bank of Russia worth over 70 billion U.S. dollars were frozen in France as of March 2022, more than in any other country that imposed sanctions in that form. Furthermore, the Bank of Russia had almost 60 billion U.S. dollars in assets frozen in Japan.

Russia had the highest number of pay TV subscribers in Eastern Europe, at nearly 41.9 million in 2021. Economic sanctions on the country over its invasion of Ukraine were expected to contribute to a decline in subscribers, whose amount was forecast at under 36.9 million in 2027. In total over that period, the number of pay TV users in Eastern Europe was projected to fall by eight million.

This statistic shows Iran's main import partners in 2023, sorted by their share in total imports. In 2023, Iran's main import partner was the China with a share of 34 percent in all imports. Iran's struggling economy Iran’s main import partners in descending order of importance include the United Arab Emirates, China, Algeria, India, South Korea and Turkey. Together the United Arab Emirates and China compose over 50 percent of all imports. No European countries or the United States are close trade partners with Iran for neither imports nor exports. Iran has been isolated from the west with sanctions due to concerns over the country's role in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction for decades. In 2011, further sanctions on Iran from the United States and Europe were agreed upon, which negatively affected Iran’s economy. This also had an effect on the value of totalimports into the country which also dropped slightly around the same period. This is likely due to the fact that Iran’s GDP per capita also reduced significantly thereafter, limiting the country’s capacity to import goods. Compared to the GDP per capita of Saudi Arabia, Iran’s is significantly lower. Aside from the Saudi Arabian oil trade, one difference could be attributed to the fact that Saudi Arabia, in contrast to Iran, has developed strong international ties and trades freely with Europe and the United States, whereas Iran remains isolated for the time being.

In 2024, around 294.54 billion U.S. dollars worth of goods were imported into Russia. That was approximately 2.64 percent less than in the previous year. Trade in Russia The value of goods imported to Russia dropped in 2014, likely due to a trade ban imposed on U.S. and European agricultural goods in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion and subsequent European sanctions against Russia. The ban impacted a range of European countries; among the most affected were Germany and the United States, Russia’s second and third most important import partners respectively. The total value of U.S. exports to Russia also dropped in 2014. However, the extent of sanctions from Europe is limited, considering most of Europe is highly dependent on Russian gas. Furthermore, Germany being one of Russia’s biggest import partners makes the country especially reluctant to take a strong stance against Russia’s aggressive actions. Therefore, while the total value of Russian imports have dropped somewhat, the majority of trade continues per usual, despite increasing tensions between Russia and the west. Meanwhile, Russia is strengthening its relations with China, its most important import partner. Yet, while intentions to increase trade with China exist, trade figures have actually decreased. Results show that sanctions and bans on imports may affect Russian trade, but the extent to which they will have an impact on business as usual may be limited given the level of dependence on trade between Europe and Russia.

This graph shows the growth in the U.S. import volume of trade goods from Russia from 1992 to 2023. In 2023, U.S. imports from Russia amounted to approximately 4.57 billion U.S. dollars. RussiaRussia's foreign trade balance of goods generated a surplus of about 187 billion U.S. dollars, with more resulting from exports than imports in 2014. Russia exported trade goods valued about 418.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. In a global ranking of national exports, Russia was sixteenth. Leading exporters like China, the United States, and Germany are exporting goods worth between 1.5 and 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars. The placement of Russia’s export ranking is linear with its placement on the ranking of the biggest economies in the world. Russia had the eleventh largest GDP worldwide with about 1.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019. Russia's most important export countries are mostly its direct neighbors, like China, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Kazakhstan. About 35 percent of all exports go to neighboring countries. China is the most important country within the aforementioned nations, which takes about 8 percent of Russia's exported goods. The United States are not among the top ten. The nation sits in twelfth place of Russia's export destinations, with about three percent. The products exported from Russia are unsurprisingly mainly mineral products and metals, with crude and refined petroleum making up for 54 percent of all exports. The main export product apart from resources is wheat. Exported wheat from Russia was valued at about 6.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2012. Russia is one of the principal wheat exporters. Although the development of Russia's exports has been somewhat positive in recent years, the political crisis with the Ukraine, resulting in economic sanctions applied by important trade countries like Germany, the EU, the United States and many others, might have dampened foreign trade altogether. The result was a negative growth in exports of about five percent in 2014.

This statistic shows Iran's export of goods from 2013 to 2023. In 2023, Iran exported goods approximately worth ***** billion U.S. dollars. Iran's export struggle The Iranian economy was not spared from the global economic crisis in 2009, but Iranian exports seemed to recover from the global economic recession in 2011 at first. However, export figures dropped thereafter because of sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union (EU) due to supposed Iran nuclear activities. This new round of sanctions spurred negative growth in 2012 and 2013 and growth dropped during the same period by around 200 billion U.S. dollars. While Iran has one of the largest oil reserves globally, daily oil production has decreased significantly since the first sanctions from the United States were put in place back in 1978. Because of a history of sanctions from Europe and the United States, neither region is among Iran’s most important export partners. While Iran had been hoping to emerge from sanctions this year, hoping to overcome international isolation and recovering lost revenue, recent tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran may cripple their progress. Saudi Arabia would prefer the sanctions against Iran remain, since relations between the two countries have gotten worse. Additionally, where Saudi Arabia is a stronger ally to the west concerning Syria, Iran leans the other way. This situation could leave Iran once again struggling to overcome its isolation from the west.

In the first quarter of 2024, the real gross domestic product (GDP) of Russia grew by 5.4 percent compared to the same quarter of the previous year. The decline in GDP recorded between the second quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023 was related to the economic impact of the war in Ukraine, in response to which Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia. However, the recent monthly GDP growth data reflects the resilience of the economy in the face of external pressure in the short term. GDP refers to the total market value of all goods and services produced within a country. It is an important indicator of economic strength. Real GDP is adjusted for price changes and is therefore regarded as a key indicator for economic growth. Trade with China has eased the sanctions’ pressure The dynamic trade relationship with China has likely played a key role in bolstering Russia's economic recovery, contributing to an over-three-percent GDP growth estimated for 2024. The importance of trade partnerships and their impact on GDP growth is underscored by the example of China's influence on both Russia's imports, especially of technology and equipment, and exports, particularly of fossil fuels. Russian economic growth in the global context Amid the global economic challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical disruptions such as the war in Ukraine, Russia's annual GDP growth was close to the global one, which was forecast to reach approximately 3.2 percent in 2024. Moreover, Russia was expected to become the fourth-fastest-growing economy in the G20 in that year, following India, Indonesia, and China.

Since 1980, Europe's largest economies have consistently been France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, although the former Soviet Union's economy was the largest in the 1980s, and Russia's economy has been larger than Spain's since 2010. Since Soviet dissolution, Germany has always had the largest economy in Europe, while either France or the UK has had the second largest economy depending on the year. Italy's economy was of a relatively similar size to that of the UK and France until the mid 2000s when it started to diverge, resulting in a difference of approximately 800 billion U.S dollars by 2018. Russia's economy had overtaken both Italy and Spain's in 2012, but has fallen since 2014 due to the drop in international oil prices and the economic sanctions imposed for its annexation of Crimea - economic growth is expected to be comparatively low in Russia in the coming years due to the economic fallout of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In 2023, based on preliminary figures, Germany exported goods to Russia valued at a total of 8.91 billion euros. This corresponds to a decrease of around 39 percent (in the previous year, the decline was already over 45 percent). The main reason for this sharp decline is the sanctions imposed on Russia by the EU and many countries around the world following the Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022.