Meeting the Challenge of Economic Sanctions: Russian Legislative and Institutional Perspective

The article deals with the Russian experience of countering foreign economic sanctions. It makes a special stress on the legislative and institutional perspectives of the Russian practice. The key point implies that, despite significant innovations, Russian institutional design of counter-sanctions policy still suffers from a number of shortcomings. A tentative list includes a lack of coherence of key concepts, unsophisticated distribution of power among different governmental agencies, legal gaps in terms of civil and criminal liability for violation of the Russian counter-sanctions legislation etc. The article provides insights into key Russian legal documents as well as the practice of their implementation. Besides that, the research aims at filling the gap in sanctions literature, related to the disbalance between studies of initiators’ policies and targets of sanctions: research on the policy of initiator states prevail over that on the target states. Inquiry into the Russian practice may contribute to the studies of target states’ policies under sanctions.