The death of Senator Lindsey Graham is a devastating blow to his family, his constituents, his colleagues in government, but also a profound setback for the resolution of global conflicts involving Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Iran. Graham’s unflinching stand on military support of Ukraine and Israel was a vital intervention in the corridors of American power. Graham introduced the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025, to tighten sanctions against Russia, with strong bipartisan support and the apparent blessing of President Donald Trump.
To be sure, while the United States holds a major lever here, the loyal support Ukraine has received from the European Union has helped strengthen Ukrainian morale and muscle on the battlefield. Yet still, much more could be done by the bloc.
The Graham sanctions legislation under consideration would impose 500% secondary tariffs, property-blocking sanctions on any financial institution owned by Russia or by individuals within the Russian government, and further banking sanctions. This Sanctioning Russia Act, perhaps soon to be renamed the Lindsey Graham Act in his memory, would deal a serious blow that could, at last, end Vladimir Putin’s bloody and imperialistic invasion of Ukraine.
Last week in Ankara, NATO leaders gathered for the ritual family photo and once again pledged unwavering support for Ukraine. It was a convergence of principled respect for the survival of a sovereign, peaceful neighboring nation and of mutual self-interest in the face of Putin’s imperial agenda.
The final communiqué was resolute, with defense budgets of NATO members finally rising and continued, generous humanitarian support for Ukraine celebrated with warm, shared applause. Yet despite all of this critical support, the West has had the power to end this war long ago—and at relatively modest cost—had it possessed the consistency to match its spirit with its actions.
How the private sector fought Putin
Beyond superior military power and a unified diplomatic voice, the West holds overwhelming economic power. The Ankara gathering promoted a comforting fiction of joint action, an exercise in self-congratulation that obscured an uncomfortable truth: the private sector has fought this war with greater consistency and greater courage than many of the governments now praising one another.
We write neither as passive bystanders nor as combatants, but as active parties nonetheless. Within days of Russia’s invasion, our Yale team mobilized nearly 200 volunteer researchers working around the clock—on the ground in Russia and neighboring countries, and deep in customs records, shipping manifests, and corporate filings—to track every major multinational operating in Russia and publicly grade each one from A to F.
That transparency campaign helped catalyze the historic withdrawal of more than 1,200 companies from Russia, the largest voluntary corporate exodus ever recorded. Those firms represented roughly 40% of Russia’s prewar GDP. Their departure erased three decades of foreign investment in months and went far beyond anything sanctions law required. That distinction matters more than many commentators appreciate. Sanctions and corporate withdrawal are complementary but fundamentally different instruments.
Economic sanctions are coercive tools by which governments compel compliance under threat of legal penalty. Voluntary corporate exits, by contrast, carry moral weight and genuine market power. When boards and CEOs independently concluded that Putin’s Russia had become both legally indefensible and commercially uninvestable, it was a major blow to Putin’s propaganda, his global standing, and his economic position.
These two approaches—government actions and private actions—are designed to function as a one-two punch, much as they did against apartheid South Africa. Sanctions prevent principled firms from being undercut by opportunistic competitors. Corporate withdrawal deprives the Kremlin of what legislation alone cannot reach: technology, capital and legitimacy. For four years, the corporate punch has landed. It is the government punch that has repeatedly been pulled, with western governments repeatedly relaxing sanctions on Russia precisely when they should be tightening them.
Consider the loosening of enforcement of energy sanctions on Russia. In March, April, and May, the Treasury Department repeatedly issued or extended general licenses allowing Russian crude already at sea to be sold and unloaded. Officials defended the waivers as measures to stabilize energy markets. The timing could hardly have been worse: the pressure had been on the verge of fracturing Putin’s economic hold. By Dec. 2025, Urals crude had fallen below $40 per barrel.
Oil and gas revenues had declined to their smallest share of Russia’s budget in two decades. The International Monetary Fund projected growth of just 0.8 percent. Then came the waivers. Russian crude exports climbed from 4.9 million barrels per day in February to six million by May, and the failure to enforce Russian energy sanctions has since allowed Putin to continue reaping windfall profits from elevated oil prices.
How Europe failed Ukraine
If Washington has been inconsistent, much of Europe has been outright contradictory. Consider France. Despite public protests against Putin, Total Energies booked $14.8 billion in write-downs while quietly retaining its crown jewels: a 19.4% stake in Novatek, Russia’s largest Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) producer, and a 20% interest in the Yamal LNG project, whose cargoes continue to arrive in French ports under long-term contracts.
France became Europe’s largest importer of Russian LNG by 2024, helping Russia build export facilities it did not previously have, even as President Emmanuel Macron urged greater strategic resolve in standing up to Russia. Le Monde reported that condensate from a Total Energies joint venture had been refined into jet fuel powering Russian aircraft attacking Ukrainian cities. The company denied wrongdoing, sold one affected stake and retained the rest.
Titanium tells a similar story. Boeing abandoned Russian titanium within weeks of the invasion and successfully rebuilt its supply chain through allied countries. Airbus, by contrast—then sourcing roughly half of its titanium from VSMPO-AVISMA, a firm linked with Rostec, the Russian state-owned defense company—argued against sanctions on Russian titanium. Airbus’s chief executive warned that sanctioning Russian titanium would amount to “sanctioning ourselves,” and the company chose brazen opportunism and stepped into the void left by Boeing.
Austria’s government has failed to rein in Raiffeisen Bank, which has remained the largest Western bank operating in Russia—at times generating roughly half of the banking group’s profits while paying hundreds of millions of euros annually into the Russian treasury. The French billionaire Mulliez family’s Auchan supermarkets never left Russia, insisting that their mission was simply to feed civilians.
Germany presents another telling example. German exports to Kyrgyzstan, a country of just seven million people, have increased roughly tenfold since the invasion. Kyrgyzstan simply became a major re-export corridor into Russia. The country has also emerged as a hub for criminal cryptocurrency activity, facilitating illicit cryptocurrency exchanges and serving as a home for A7A5, the Russian-backed stablecoin. Financial regulators in the country allow Western sanctioned cryptocurrency companies to operate freely.
Yet Europe has extended Kyrgyzstan highly favorable trade conditions through the Generalized Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+), which allows the country to export more than 6,200 categories of goods to the EU market duty-free. Meanwhile, uncontrolled Greek shipowners have profited by selling dozens of aging tankers into Russia’s shadow fleet, helping sustain sanctions evasion while contributing to mounting environmental risks.
The failure is not confined to Europe. India’s refiners, which purchased almost no Russian crude before the war, now source as much as 40% of their imports from Russia before exporting refined products back to Western markets at a premium. Against this backdrop, the consistency of the corporate exodus, led overwhelmingly by American firms, is all the more striking. Of the more than 1,500 companies we continue to monitor, over 1,000 have reduced or ended their Russian operations beyond anything legally required.
The most significant backsliding has come disproportionately from German, French, Indian, Chinese, and Uzbek firms, all publicly identified and graded in our database. Even Putin has warned that Western companies that “slammed the door” should not expect an easy return. American companies, by and large, kept their word. Too many governments did not.
How to stop the Kremlin from avoiding sanctions
The question hanging over Ankara was not whether economic pressure works. The real question is whether elected governments can match the determination that so many private companies have already demonstrated. So far, they have come up woefully short.
Making it worse, Russia has found increasingly clever ways to evade existing sanctions, and the existing sanctions regime is plainly failing to keep pace. As Alexander Browder has found in his groundbreaking research, the so-called A7 network—a privately owned Russian payments platform that is aligned with the Russian government and faces sanctions—moves an estimated $90 billion annually, more than half of Russia’s entire military budget.
Yet the A7 network has been the target of just a single government sanction, which the Senate Banking Committee itself described as “clearly insufficient.” Its flagship financial instrument, the A7A5 stablecoin is backed by a sanctioned Russian defense bank. And yet, it has inexplicably remained beyond the reach of government sanctions.
The prescription is straightforward: deploy a far more complete and comprehensive set of economic sanctions against Russia; dismantle its shadow financing network—A7A5 chief among them—by cutting off the enablers operating within Kyrgyzstan and other intermediary countries; sanction the shadow fleet vessel by vessel to stop the illicit flow of Russian oil; impose meaningful secondary tariffs; and stop accommodating European companies—Total Energies, Airbus, and Raiffeisen among them—whose conduct has actively helped Russia rebuild its economic capabilities.
The historical precedent is instructive. In 1992, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the towering anti-apartheid voice of South Africa, told one of us that government sanctions against Pretoria had been widely dismissed by the white South African establishment as neo-colonialism, until the private sector joined in with a stampede of some 200 firms exiting the country, led by General Motors, IBM and Coca-Cola.
The lesson was clear then and remains clear now: the coordination of the left hand of government with the right hand of business matters profoundly. Researchers studying spinal mechanics have demonstrated that lifting a 50-pound object with two hands is biomechanically and neurologically less taxing than lifting two individual 25-pound weights—each hand working alone strains what both hands together could manage with ease. More than 1,200 companies did their part. They held the line through the grueling years of war, resisting the pull of profits and the pressure of Kremlin retaliation. Now governments must step up and show the same determination and courage in applying more comprehensive sanctions on Russia.
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