The death of Senator Lindsey Graham is a devastating blow to his family, his constituents and his colleagues in the administration, but it also represents a serious obstacle to resolving the global conflicts between Ukraine and Russia and between Israel and Iran. Graham's unwavering position in support of military aid to Ukraine and Israel played a crucial role in decision-making in senior US political circles. Graham introduced the "Russia Sanctions Act" in 2025, which aims to strengthen sanctions against Russia. He received broad bipartisan support and the obvious blessing of President Donald Trump.
This is what leading American economist Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, former Secretary of Economic Development Robert Hormats, analyst and former US ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, and Alexander Browder, a researcher of channels for circumventing sanctions against Russia, wrote in an article for the American magazine TIME.
The US undoubtedly has the most powerful tool for pressure, but the constant support of the European Union has also contributed to strengthening Ukraine's morale and combat capabilities. However, the EU could do much more. Graham's proposed law provides for the introduction of 500% secondary duties, the blocking of property and assets of any financial institution owned by Russia or representatives of the Russian government, as well as additional banking sanctions. This "Russia Sanctions Act", which will likely soon be renamed the "Lindsey Graham Act" in his memory, would deal a serious blow to Vladimir Putin's regime and could finally put an end to his bloody and imperialist invasion of Ukraine.
Last week in Ankara, NATO leaders gathered for a traditional group photo and renewed their unwavering support for Ukraine. It was an expression of both their principled commitment to the survival of a sovereign and peaceful neighbor and their recognized common interest in the face of Putin's imperialist ambitions. The final declaration was emphatic: NATO defense spending is finally increasing, and the generous humanitarian support for Ukraine was greeted with warm and unanimous applause. Yet, despite all this critical support, the West had the power to end this war long ago—and at a relatively modest cost—if it had been consistent and backed up its stated principles with real action.
How did the private sector stand up to Putin?
In addition to its military superiority and unified diplomatic stance, the West also wields enormous economic power. The Ankara meeting created a reassuring impression of joint action, but it concealed an inconvenient truth: the private sector has been fighting this economic battle with greater consistency and courage than many governments that now congratulate each other.
We are neither bystanders nor participants in the hostilities, but we are active in this struggle. Within days of the Russian invasion, our Yale team mobilized nearly 200 volunteer researchers to monitor the activities of all the major international companies remaining in Russia and neighboring countries around the clock. We examined customs records, shipping documents, and corporate accounts, and publicly rated each company on an A to F scale. This transparency campaign helped more than 1,200 companies voluntarily cease or significantly reduce their operations in Russia—the largest voluntary corporate withdrawal in history. These firms accounted for approximately 40 percent of Russia’s prewar GDP. Their departure wiped out three decades of foreign investment in a matter of months and far exceeded the requirements of international sanctions. This distinction is more important than many commentators realize. Sanctions and corporate withdrawal are complementary but fundamentally different tools.
Economic sanctions are coercive measures by which governments compel companies to comply with rules under threat of legal penalty. Voluntary business withdrawal, by contrast, carries moral weight and real market power. When boards and CEOs came to the conclusion themselves that Putin’s Russia had become both legally unacceptable and economically unattractive, it dealt a severe blow to Putin’s propaganda, his international authority, and the Kremlin’s economic positions.
These two approaches—state sanctions and voluntary private-sector action—should work together as a single force, much like the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. Sanctions prevent principled companies from being displaced by more unscrupulous competitors. Corporate withdrawal deprives the Kremlin of what legislation alone cannot: technology, capital, and legitimacy. Over the past four years, corporate pressure has been the consistent force. Unfortunately, many Western governments have repeatedly eased sanctions at a time when they should have tightened them.
For example, in March, April, and May, the U.S. Treasury Department repeatedly issued or extended general licenses allowing Russian oil that had already been loaded onto ships to be sold and unloaded. Officials defended the waivers as measures to stabilize energy markets. But the timing could hardly have been more opportune: the pressure was on the verge of destroying Putin’s economic influence. By December 2025, Urals crude had fallen below $40 a barrel.
Oil and gas revenues fell to their smallest share of the Russian budget in two decades. The International Monetary Fund had forecast growth of just 0.8 percent. Then came the waivers. Russian crude exports rose from 4.9 million barrels per day in February to 6 million in May, and the inability to enforce Russian energy sanctions since then has allowed Putin to continue to reap windfall profits from higher oil prices.
How did Europe fail Ukraine?
While Washington was inconsistent, much of Europe was openly contradictory. Take France, for example. Despite public protests against Putin, Total Energies has written off $14.8 billion while quietly retaining its core assets: a 19.4% stake in Novatek, Russia’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) producer, and a 20% stake in the Yamal LNG project, whose cargoes continue to arrive at French ports under long-term contracts.
By 2024, France had become Europe’s largest importer of Russian LNG, helping Russia build export facilities it previously lacked, even as President Emmanuel Macron urged greater strategic resolve in confronting Russia. Le Monde newspaper reported that gas condensate from a Total Energies joint venture was being processed into jet fuel used by Russian planes in attacks on Ukrainian cities. The company denied wrongdoing, sold one of its affected shares but kept the others.
The story with titanium is similar. Boeing divested itself of Russian titanium within weeks of the invasion and successfully restructured its supply chain through allied countries. In contrast, Airbus—then sourcing roughly half of its titanium from VSMPO-AVISMA, a company affiliated with Russia’s state defense corporation Rostec—opposed sanctions on Russian titanium. Airbus’s CEO warned that sanctioning Russian titanium would mean “sanctioning ourselves,” and the company chose shameless opportunism and filled the void left by Boeing.
The Austrian government failed to rein in Raiffeisen Bank, which remained the largest Western bank operating in Russia. At one point, it generated roughly half of the banking group’s profits, while also funneling hundreds of millions of euros a year into the Russian treasury. The Auchan supermarkets of the French billionaire Mulliez family never left Russia, insisting that their mission was simply to feed the civilian population.
Germany is also a telling example. German exports to Kyrgyzstan, a country of just 7 million people, have increased roughly tenfold since the invasion. Kyrgyzstan has simply become a major transit route for re-exports to Russia. The country has also become a hub for criminal cryptocurrency activity, facilitating illicit cryptocurrency exchanges and serving as home to A7A5, the Russian-backed stablecoin. The country’s financial regulators have allowed Western-sanctioned cryptocurrency companies to operate freely.
Yet Europe has granted Kyrgyzstan extremely favorable trade conditions through the Generalized Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+), which allows the country to export over 6,200 categories of goods to the EU market duty-free. Meanwhile, unregulated Greek shipowners are profiting from the sale of dozens of aging tankers to Russia’s shadowy fleet, helping to circumvent sanctions and increasing the risk of environmental disasters.
The collapse is not limited to Europe. Indian refiners, which bought almost no Russian crude before the war, now source up to 40% of their imports from Russia before exporting the refined products back to Western markets at inflated prices. Against this backdrop, the consistency of the corporate exodus, led largely by American firms, is all the more striking. Of the more than 1,500 companies we continue to monitor, more than 1,000 have curtailed or closed down their operations in Russia to a much greater extent than required by law.
The most significant contractions have occurred disproportionately among German, French, Indian, Chinese and Uzbek firms, all publicly identified and rated in our database. Even Putin warned that Western companies that "slammed the door" should not expect an easy comeback. American companies have generally kept their word. Too many governments, however, have not.
How to stop the Kremlin from evading sanctions?
The question hanging over Ankara was no longer whether economic pressure was working. The real question was whether democratically elected governments could show the same determination that so many private companies had already demonstrated. So far, they have failed miserably.
Even worse, Russia is finding increasingly sophisticated ways to circumvent existing sanctions, and the existing sanctions regime is clearly failing to keep up. As Alexander Browder found in his groundbreaking research, the so-called A7 Network—a private Russian payments platform that is tied to the Russian government and faces sanctions—processes an estimated $90 billion a year, more than half of Russia’s entire military budget.
Yet the A7 Network has been the subject of only one government sanction, which the Senate Banking Committee itself described as "manifestly inadequate". Its flagship financial instrument, the A7A5 stablecoin, is backed by a sanctioned Russian defense bank. And yet, it inexplicably remains outside the reach of government sanctions.
The recipe is simple: impose a far more comprehensive and far-reaching set of economic sanctions on Russia; dismantle its shadowy financial network, led by A7A5, by shutting down its intermediaries in Kyrgyzstan and other transit countries; sanctioning individual ships of the shadowy fleet to stop the illicit flow of Russian oil; imposing significant secondary tariffs; ending the tolerance of European companies such as Total Energies, Airbus and Raiffeisen, whose behavior has actively helped Russia rebuild its economic capacity.
The historical precedent is telling. In 1992, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a prominent anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, said that the government’s sanctions against Pretoria were widely rejected by the white South African elite as neocolonialism, until the private sector joined in, triggering a mass exodus of some 200 companies from the country, led by General Motors, IBM and Coca-Cola.
The lesson was clear then and remains clear now: coordination between the left arm of government and the right arm of business is crucial. Researchers studying spinal mechanics have shown that lifting a 22-kilogram object with two hands is biomechanically and neurologically less taxing than lifting two separate 11-kilogram weights—each hand working independently creates a load that both hands together could easily handle.
More than 1,200 companies have done their part. They held the front lines during the grueling years of war, resisting both the temptation of profit and the pressure of Kremlin repression. Now it is the turn of governments to show the same determination and courage by imposing more comprehensive sanctions on Russia.