Introduction

Abstract

Part One establishes the analytical and conceptual foundation of the entire report by defining EU sanctions against Russia as a cumulative and evolving architecture of pressure rather than a simple sequence of isolated packages. It argues that sanctions must be assessed through multiple dimensions, including political, economic, social, legal, hybrid, and compliance effects, because binary judgments about whether sanctions “work” are methodologically insufficient. The section shows that sanctions policy can only be understood properly in connection with Russia’s internal political, economic, and social adaptation mechanisms, which shape how external pressure is absorbed, redirected, or partially neutralised. It also develops the report’s methodological basis by combining political economy analysis, institutional and legal analysis, comparative-historical reasoning, and public policy effectiveness analysis into a single evaluative framework. A major contribution of this part is its explanation that contemporary sanctions have evolved from narrowly targeted measures into systemic and hybrid regimes that depend heavily on compliance systems, anti-circumvention controls, and coalition coordination. The Introduction further clarifies that the sanctions regime against Russia in 2022–2025 is unprecedented in scale, cumulative in legal design, and increasingly oriented towards constraining adaptation channels rather than merely announcing new prohibitions. It identifies the main objectives of the regime as coercion, deterrence, degradation of capacity, signalling, and institutional constraint, each operating through different mechanisms and over different time horizons. In the context of the whole publication, Part One is crucial because it provides the interpretive logic for all later chapters and frames the report as a forward-looking governance analysis rather than a descriptive political commentary.