Russia’s recent announcement on sanctions against a 17-year-old investigator is both absurd and revealing.
Alexander Browder, whose sanction was trumpeted this week by the Kremlin, is the son of anti-corruption campaigner Bill Browder, recognized for his work exposing abuses and human rights violations by Russia after the 2009 death in prison of the senior Browder’s lawyer and accountant, the whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky.
That a nuclear power purporting to be an international actor would place a British high school student on a sanctions list would be ridiculous were it not so telling. The issue is not the teenager himself, but what his reporting allegedly uncovered: the growing sophistication of authoritarian sanctions evasion networks tied to cryptocurrency, third-country players, and convoluted and twisted financial systems that can be exploited by nefarious actors.
Yet by targeting Browder, the Kremlin inadvertently highlighted an uncomfortable truth: Sanctions still matter.
If probes into cryptocurrency laundering and sanctions circumvention were irrelevant, Moscow would have ignored them. Instead, Russia chose to elevate a young researcher into an uncomfortable role as a geopolitical antagonist, handing him international attention while underscoring its own defensiveness. And while Browder joins an esteemed group of professionals sanctioned by Russia, it’s probably not what was on his summer to-do list.
But while Russia sanctioning a teenager deserves mockery, the broader challenge to Western military, security, economic and political spheres require serious attention.
The George W. Bush Institute’s recent China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) report shows that these four authoritarian regimes are increasingly cooperating to weaken Western economic pressure and blunt the effectiveness of international sanctions. Though, fortunately, the CRINK countries haven’t crafted any sort of formal alliance with the political strength and staying power of NATO.
The Bush Institute’s CRINK framework offers a strategic lens for understanding the episode surrounding the younger Browder as well as the authoritarians’ methods. It also offers some recommended solutions.
The United States and allied and partner democracies can enforce sanctions more effectively in a world where Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea cooperate economically and technologically, as our report and our experts detail.
Russia is reportedly using cryptocurrency-based mechanisms to evade U.S. sanctions, a move which fits squarely within this pattern. Sanctions enforcement can no longer rely exclusively on traditional banking oversight and static designation lists. It requires coordinated intelligence sharing, aggressive anti-money laundering enforcement and close cooperation with allies including use of secondary sanctions.
As our recommendations suggest, the United States should expand the use of secondary sanctions to penalize third-party entities that facilitate transactions between CRINK members, and collaborate with allies to secure a decentralized online platform that shares information and data on sanctioned entities to reduce the enforcement burden.
The Kremlin’s decision to sanction Alexander Browder may be laughable, but the underlying effort by authoritarian states to build nefarious workarounds to Western sanctions isn’t. The CRINK initiative correctly frames this as a long-term strategic competition requiring democracies to modernize how they use economic power in defense of international security and democratic norms.
