The shift started in 2014 and never really stopped. After Russia seized Crimea and the Donbas, the United States, the European Union and like-minded governments began aiming coercive economic measures at one of the Kremlin’s largest revenue sources: energy. A numbers-focused report by CNAS, the Center for a New American Security, published in April 2024, tallies the whole campaign, from July 2014 through December 2023, across oil, gas, minerals and mining, and nuclear fuel. The record it builds is one of escalating measures with a deliberate blind spot.
The 2014 opening
The first wave cut technology, not oil. In July 2014, Washington and Brussels banned exports of critical equipment for the Russian oil sector, covering deepwater and Arctic exploration and shale projects, and the United States later extended the ban to ventures involving sanctioned Russian entities holding at least a 33 percent stake. In September 2014, the United States blocked new long-term debt and equity dealings with six leading Russian energy companies and the EU with three, alongside asset freezes and travel bans on sector figures. Six majors, Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil, Novatek, Transneft and Surgutneftegas, landed on the Sectoral Sanctions Identifications list, a low rung of the escalation ladder: it only bars U.S. persons from “transacting in, providing financing for, or otherwise dealing in debt of specified tenors or equity if that debt or equity was or is issued on or after the relevant sanctions effective date”. The tougher Specially Designated Nationals listing, by contrast, means “engaging in any transactions with SDNs and [requires U.S. persons to] block any property in their possession or under their control in which an SDN has an interest.” The design principle, CNAS notes, was to degrade future production while leaving current output, then flowing from traditional onshore wells, untouched.
The pipeline decade
Natural gas was where the alliance wobbled. Nord Stream 1 had been Gazprom’s main export route to Europe since 2010, and from 2011 EU states, Germany above all, championed a second line, many German politicians betting that economic interdependence would buy peace. Gazprom launched Nord Stream 2 in 2015 with five EU companies as lenders; construction waited until 2018. Then Congress acted: the 2017 CAATSA law authorized penalties on pipeline builders, though 2018 guidance confined them to “persons determined to have knowingly engaged in a significant transaction, on or after the date the Act was enacted, with a person that is part of or operating for or on behalf of the defense or intelligence sectors of the Government of the Russian Federation”, which spared the already-started project. The 2019 PEESA law went further, sanctioning anyone who “knowingly, on or after the date of the enactment of this Act, [who] sells, leases, or provides pipe-laying vessels for the construction of any Russian-origin energy export pipeline that makes landfall in Germany or Turkey”. By early 2021 the two laws had hit roughly 20 vessels and 10 persons tied to Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream, even as waivers protected the pipeline’s own parent company and its CEO, Matthias Warnig. Germany’s regulator suspended Nord Stream 2 certification in November 2021 because its operator subsidiary did not “fulfil the requirements of an independent transmission operator”.
2022, and what actually bites
From February 2022, a coalition of 45 allies and partners layered sanctions, tariffs, export controls and price caps over the 2014 architecture, aiming, as CNAS frames it, to degrade Russia’s capacity to fund aggression while keeping energy available to the world. The limits stayed visible: Russia remains a top provider of gas, oil and select minerals, and on nuclear, where Moscow dominates uranium and enrichment services, the West is itself a reliant customer with few safe financial tools.
What would actually change Kremlin behavior was the argument Edward Fishman and Chris Miller made in POLITICO in January 2022, weeks before the invasion: past penalties had been imposed gradually, negotiated with reluctant allies and priced to spare the West, the sanctions equivalent of wanting to “do something”. Their prescription was scale: full-blocking sanctions on giants like Sberbank, plus a slow squeeze on oil, around 45 percent of Russian exports, perhaps paring Russian oil exports by 10 percentage points annually across a decade. SWIFT removal, they noted, is not the “nuclear option” people imagine. A decade in, the numbers report’s quiet verdict stands: for all the design, Russia’s ability to keep producing and supplying global markets largely survived the first ten years of sanctions.
Sources
- Sanctions by The Numbers: The Russian Energy Sector | CNAS
- Opinion | The Russia Sanctions That Could Actually Stop Putin – POLITICO
