Bendunomics · Research Program

Sanctions and Money Laundering Studies

A reference catalog of major Western sanctions — against Russia, China and Iran — year by year, from 1979 to today, with the legal instrument, the target, and what each measure does. Every entry cited to an official source. Alongside it: how sanctions and anti-money-laundering enforcement actually work.

All years click a year, or drag across the bars to select a period

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Explainer

How sanctions work

The legal machinery behind the headlines: IEEPA and executive orders, OFAC and the SDN list, the 50 percent rule, secondary sanctions, export controls, SWIFT exclusion, price caps, who imposes what, and how it bites in practice.

Explainer

How money laundering works, and how it is fought

Placement, layering, integration, and the documented evasion playbook: shell companies, trade-based laundering, shadow fleets, hawala, underground banking, crypto. Plus FATF's blacklist and greylist, and what they do to a country's banking access.

What this catalogs
Major sanctions actions — new legal instruments, numbered packages, and broad designation waves — imposed on Russia, China and Iran by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the G7, with coordinated partners (Canada, Australia, the E3) shown where they acted jointly. It records the date, the legal instrument, the target, and a plain-language description of what each measure does. It is a factual reference: it does not score or judge the measures. Individual entity designations are not listed one by one; designation waves with broad impact are.

How entries are classified
Each action carries three labels. Target says who or what is hit: named individuals, companies and organizations, vessels and aircraft, state bodies, or a whole sector of the economy. Sector says which part of the economy is affected: finance, energy, defense, technology, trade and goods, transport, or media. Measures say what is actually done: asset freezes, visa bans, export controls, import bans, capital-markets restrictions, SWIFT exclusion, price caps, embargoes, investment bans, or correspondent-banking restrictions. The three labels are editorial classifications derived from each entry's verified text; the legal texts linked from every entry are authoritative. Liftings, expiries and reimpositions are recorded as actions in their own right — for example the 2016 JCPOA Implementation Day relief and the 2025 snapback.

Sources
Every entry links to its source, drawn primarily from official publishers: the U.S. Department of the Treasury and OFAC (home.treasury.gov), the U.S. State Department, the Bureau of Industry and Security, the U.S. Congress (congress.gov) and the Congressional Research Service, the Council of the EU and EUR-Lex (eur-lex.europa.eu), the UK government (gov.uk), and the United Nations Security Council (un.org). Wire-service reporting is used only where no official link exists.

Verification
Each entry's date, legal instrument, and issuer were independently re-checked against official sources before publication; entries that could not be verified were removed.

Coverage note
A date showing only month and year means only the month is documented. The catalog aims for completeness at the level of major actions, not exhaustiveness at the level of every listed person or entity; the source links lead to the full legal texts and designation lists. All data is stored locally — no live API calls at runtime.

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