DYNAMICS OF SANCTIONS COOPERATION BETWEEN THE WORLD'S LEADING COUNTRIES

Sanctions cooperation plays an important part in securing effectiveness of the special restrictive measures, especially so in view of the current global economic and political instability and russia's destructive behaviour. The article is devoted to the problem of sanctions cooperation between the leading countries. Using the data from the national sanctions lists of Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and the United States of America as the largest senders of special restrictive measures, we provide the number of unique sanctioned entities and describe the dynamics of imposed sanctions, their growth rates, and the share of sanctioned entities, related to the territory of russia during 2022–2024, noting an increase in imposed special restrictive measures both overall, and especially against russia, but also a decrease in the average number of countries sanctioning each entity, implying a decrease in sanctions coordination between the senders. We then calculate indicators, which reflect the level of sender's cooperation in the selection of entities for sanctioning, namely the shares of sanctions in the structure of sanctioned entities and the average shares of common sanctioned entities for each sender, separately for all sanctions and for sanctions against russia. This allows us to find a negative relation between the number of sanctioned entities and the level of sanctions cooperation, that suggests a downward tendency in cooperation instances that runs opposite to the increase in number of imposed special restrictive measures, which, for a lesser degree, persists for the sanctioning efforts against russia, signifying global difficulties in coordinating national sanctions policies for dealing not only with the threats to national security of individual countries, but also in generating economic pressure and fighting off the common threat of russia's armed expansion. We believe the efforts in improving sanctions cooperation are needed, so as to ensure the effectiveness of restrictive measures in dealing with current and future threats.