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Articles, Magazine “Understanding Blockades”

What a blockade means for households, small firms and large companies

· Helfen statt Blockieren editorial team

Sanctions and blockades are decided in capitals, but their costs arise at the kitchen table, in the workshop and on the corporate balance sheet. This piece sets out what research knows about the effects, for the target country and for the country imposing them, and where the numbers are missing.

8.7%Inflation in Germany, 2022Eurostat
40.5%SMEs reporting restrictive banks, Q2 2026KfW-ifo
−74.2%German exports to Russia, 2025 vs 2021Eurostat Comext
30 / 31studies finding harm in the target countryRodríguez 2024

At home: prices, transfers, health

For households in the country that imposes sanctions, the effect shows up mainly at the till. In Germany consumer prices rose by 8.7% in 2022, energy by 34.7%. Behind this lay a bundle of causes: the war against Ukraine, Russia’s halt of gas deliveries through Nord Stream 1 in summer 2022, the EU import bans on coal and oil, and post-pandemic catch-up effects. The gas cut-off was a Russian decision, not an EU sanction; in daily life the two work together.

Anyone who sends money to a sanctioned country, or receives money from one, experiences sanctions as waiting and refusal. Banks screen names, countries and goods; many go further than the law requires, because a mistake costs more than a lost customer. There is no official count of refused payments. One example with both sides: on 23 November 2020 Western Union closed its 407 outlets in Cuba after the US government barred dealings with Fincimex, a partner belonging to the military-run conglomerate GAESA. The Cuban government declined to switch to a provider without military ties. After a pause of about two years Western Union resumed transfers; on 5 February 2025 it suspended them again. The US embargo and the decisions of Cuba’s leadership together narrowed the path of the money; under the same leadership Prisoners Defenders counted 1,351 political prisoners (30 September 2026; 496 of them convicted but not in prison).

In the target country health is at stake too. Human Rights Watch documented in 2019 that banks and firms avoided even permitted deliveries to Iran; one European manufacturer stopped selling special dressings for about 800 people with a rare skin disease. Across many countries, UN sanctions reduce life expectancy considerably more than US sanctions, and women are hit harder (Gutmann, Neuenkirch, Neumeier 2021).

In a small business: screening, credit, materials

Small firms are rarely hit by a ban that applies to them directly, but by other people’s caution. In the DIHK survey “Going International 2026”, 69 percent of 2,400 internationally active firms reported more trade barriers, a record; among those facing non-tariff barriers, 30 percent named sanctions and 35 percent stricter export controls. On credit, 40.5% of SMEs seeking loans found their bank restrictive in the second quarter of 2026, more than ever since 2017; in the third quarter just under 36 percent. And in November 2025, 11.2 percent of manufacturers lacked materials, 27.6 percent in the car industry; the ifo Institute saw China’s export controls on rare earths as the likely cause, though it did not ask about it.

How strict banks are with loan requests

Share of firms in loan negotiations that find banks restrictive, percent.

QuarterSMEsLarge firms
2026 Q240.5%32.9%
2026 Q336.0%27.0%

KfW-ifo credit hurdle Q2 2026; KfW, 29 Oct 2026 (Q3 rounded).

In a large company: write-downs, rescue, restructuring

Large firms carry the large single amounts. Uniper, Germany’s largest gas importer, reported a loss of 19.1 billion euros for 2022 because missing Russian gas had to be replaced at high cost; the federal government took over 99.1 percent. Energy-intensive industries produced 15.2 percent less in March 2026 than in February 2022. Carmakers in the DAX earned 42 percent less in 2025, partly because of tariffs and weaker demand in China. Large firms can spread such burdens more easily; small firms tend to carry running costs. There are indications of this difference, but no study that quantifies it for Germany.

In the target country: short and long run

Research is fairly united here. UN sanctions cut annual growth of income per head by more than 2 percentage points for about ten years, 25.5 percent in total; US sanctions by 0.75 to 1 percentage points a year, over seven years 13.4 percent in total (Neuenkirch, Neumeier 2015). The damage falls mostly in the first years, and no recovery appears while the sanctions last (Gutmann et al. 2023). On average, sanctions also worsen human rights (Peksen 2009). A survey of 31 quantitative studies finds negative effects on income, poverty, inequality, mortality or human rights in 30 of them (Rodríguez 2024). Emigration adds to this: according to official statistics, Cuba lost 245,264 inhabitants to migration in 2025.

Single death tolls call for caution. A survey from Iraq published in 1999, according to which child mortality rose sharply under UN sanctions, is now considered manipulated (Dyson, Cetorelli 2017). For Venezuela it is disputed whether US sanctions from 2017 or the earlier collapse of the oil industry explain the larger part of the hardship.

In the sanctioning country

The sender pays as well. After 2014 Russia lost about 53 billion US dollars, or 7.4 percent of its expected exports, by the end of 2015; the sanctioning countries lost about 42 billion US dollars, or 0.3 percent of their exports, most of it in goods that were not banned at all. The authors call this “friendly fire”: banks and firms avoid a whole country when risk rises (Crozet, Hinz 2020). Since 2022 German exports to Russia have fallen to 6.9 billion euros, from 26.8 billion in 2021. Whether sanctions achieve their political aim is another question: in one large study they contributed substantially to the goal in about a third of cases (Hufbauer et al. 2007); others count more strictly and find fewer.

Germany’s trade with Russia

Billion euros per year, nominal. 2014 first EU economic sanctions; 2022 war, gas cut-off and embargoes.

YearExportsImports
201026.329.9
201134.438.3
201238.040.0
201335.839.1
201429.236.2
201521.727.4
201621.524.1
201725.828.6
201826.032.9
201926.727.9
202023.219.2
202126.829.0
202214.530.6
20238.92.4
20247.61.3
20256.90.9

Analysis: Helfen statt Blockieren. Data: Eurostat Comext DS-045409, 16.10.2026.

At the same time German exports to some of Russia’s neighbours rose sharply, to Kyrgyzstan from 50 million euros (2021) to 713 million euros (2023).

Exports to Russia’s neighbours

German exports, index 2021 = 100. A rise fits re-routing via third countries but does not prove it.

Country2021202220232025
Kyrgyzstan1006521,438878
Armenia100265274223
Kazakhstan100194223187
Russia100543326

Analysis: Helfen statt Blockieren. Data: Eurostat Comext DS-045409, 16.10.2026.

What the numbers do not say

  • They do not separate sanctions from war, counter-sanctions and market trends.
  • Nobody officially counts the cost of bank caution, that is refused or delayed permitted payments.
  • Cross-country studies show averages; a single country can fare better or worse.

What a refused payment means in detail is explained in “Why a permitted payment gets stuck”. How Germany is doing overall is covered in “The case of Germany”.

Check the numbers

The time series are available as CSV files and the calculation as a Python script without extra libraries: daten/abruf.py downloads the data from Eurostat and the IMF, daten/auswertung.py computes the results (ergebnis_*.csv). Chain-linked volumes do not add up exactly; differences in the last digit are rounding.

This piece is information, not legal or investment advice. “Helfen statt Blockieren” is non-partisan.

Sources

All online sources accessed on 3 November 2026.

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