Double-Edged Weapon – Reflections on the Scope of the Sanctions Imposed as a Punishment for Genocide in Ukraine

Abstract

The article consists of three basic components in which the author uses legal-historical and legal-comparative methodology. In many parts of the text concerning commonly known information which does not require a detailed presentation, the author emphasizes the selectivity of his comments. In the first part, which is a terminological analysis, the author explains the content of terms such as “genocide”, which require commentary on the definitional components of these crimes that distinguish them from other murders, rapes and war crimes. In view of the decision of the International Criminal Court ordering the arrest of President Putin for war crimes, clarification was required that the Court uses the term war crimes in a broad sense, and, in fact, the Court’s jurisdiction over war crimes also includes crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity. The article also explains the process of the development of the legal meaning of the term “sanctions”. The author emphasizes in this section that his main purpose is not to enumerate in detail the changing and supplemented sanctions, but to consider to what extent the sanctions already imposed have affected the crisis of the Russian economy and to what extent they have contributed to the recession of the “global economy”. In this section, the article explains the differences between the currents of globalization and the globalization which is often identified with global economics. The second part presents the problems that the countries of the market economy tried to solve before the start of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Many issues, such as the “climate crisis”, “pandemic” or the phenomenon “inflation”, seem to be widely understood. However, for a broader explanation of these phenomena, the author used the comparative methodology which was the most appropriate. The third part focuses on the analysis of the effectiveness of the sanctions imposed on Russia, and, above all, on their contribution to the economic isolation of Russia. This part is also aimed at assessing to what extent the sanctions imposed on Russia exacerbate the existing economic problems of Western countries so to what extent they can constitute the “double-edged weapon”.