On 23 July 2026, the Council of the European Union adopted its twenty-first new-wave sanctions package against the at-war Russian Federation, adding 218 asset-freeze designations across the Russian and Belarusian regimes. Among the entities banned from the 13th of August were A7 Nigeria, A7 Africa and PilotFinance Ltd; eleven further crypto and payment platforms followed ten days later, all of which were established following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (Global Trade and Sanctions Law, 2026). These multinational organisations originate from A7, a Russian payments company the EU had already sanctioned in 2025 along with its main product, a Ruble-pegged stablecoin called A7A5. In a sense, Brussels was chasing a network that had already been sanctioned once, restructured, and kept operating globally nonetheless.
A7A5 was launched in January 2025 by A7 LLC, whose principal shareholders are Ilan Shor, sanctioned for interfering in Moldova’s elections on Russia’s behalf, and Promsvyazbank, Russia’s primary sanctioned state defence bank (RFE/RL, 2026). When A7 opened a physical branch in Vladivostok in September 2025, President Vladimir Putin attended the ribbon-cutting by video link, and the Russian investigative outlet Proyekt reported that its high net-worth users include the oligarch Roman Abramovich and former FSB director Nikolai Patrushev (RFE/RL, 2026). In its first year the token moved more than $102 billion across roughly 251,000 transactions, briefly making it the highest-value and largest non-dollar aligned stablecoin in the world (Elliptic, 2026). Tangibly, it allowed Russian firms to hold value in rubles and convert briefly into dollar-linked crypto only when a transaction required it, avoiding the freezes Tether had begun applying as per Western sanctions. Its significance lies less in evasion than in the proof of its concept: for the first time since 2022, sanctioned Russian capital had an alternative route into the international economy that reached a global scale entirely outside the institutions Washington and Brussels could sway.
This is the dynamic Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe as weaponised interdependence: a process in which states occupying central nodes in global financial networks can deny rivals access to those networks, turning economic integration into coercion and persuasive alliance (Farrell and Newman, 2019). A7A5 exposes the limit of that strategy, as a state cut off from the dominant network responds by building an alternative one, and once that alternative reaches scale, the coercing power must extend enforcement into physical territory. In this case, a blockchain and a cluster of offshore shell companies, that builds upon its original leverage to facilitate global reach. Sanctions extend this contest instead of closing it.
By mid-2026 the experiment had visibly failed on its own terms. A7A5’s daily transaction volume fell to $24.3 million in June, down 96 per cent from its July 2025 peak, and no new tokens had been issued since July 2025 (Elliptic, 2026). Grinex, the Kyrgyz exchange handling most A7A5 trading, was hacked for $15 million in April and suspended card top-ups the same month, its main source of fresh rubles. Rather than abandon the project, Russia’s parliament passed legislation, effective from 1 September 2026, placing cryptoasset exchanges under Bank of Russia supervision while explicitly authorising their use in foreign trade (Elliptic, 2026). Each failed instrument of this diversion is being replaced by a more organised successor, and Russian trade is growing durably more dependent on Central Asian intermediaries and infrastructure no Western regulator can subpoena. That realignment has the potential to outlast whatever settlement eventually ends the war in Ukraine.
Iran shows a matured and well-rounded version of the same mechanism. China buys roughly 90% of Iran’s oil exports, typically at a discount of $8 to $10 a barrel, importing nearly 1.4 million barrels a day in 2025 while its own customs data record no Iranian imports at all. The trade, worth an estimated $31.2 billion that year, is logged as Malaysian, Omani or Emirati crude and carried by tankers that switch flags, disable tracking and transfer cargo from ship to ship at sea (U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2026). That revenue has the potential to fund close to 45 per cent of Iran’s government budget. Washington has responded by sanctioning the Chinese terminals, refineries and currency-exchange houses that clear the payments, under a campaign it calls Economic Fury, rather than direct Iranian entities with no exposure to the dollar system in the first place (U.S. Department of State, 2026). Sanctions have constrained Iran’s oil trade exactly as intended, and simultaneously handed Beijing structural leverage over Iranian policy, since Tehran’s economic survival now depends on the one buyer able to absorb the enforcement risk and economic independence.
Syria tests a similar logic in reverse. Since the Assad government fell in December 2024, Washington has strived to dismantle a sanctions architecture built over four decades: OFAC lifted 518 designations in 2025, and on 24 August 2026 the State Department formally removed Syria from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, ending a status held since 1979 (Türkiye Today, 2026). The economy this relief now governs has contracted an estimated 83 per cent since 2010, against reconstruction costs the United Nations puts above $250 billion (Atlantic Council, 2025). Syria has rejoined SWIFT for the first time in over a decade and reengaged the IMF and World Bank for the first time since 2009 (Atlantic Council, 2025). However, none of this returns Syria to the position it held before 2011. It re-enters a system redesigned in its absence, where reconstruction financing arrives through Gulf and Turkish-brokered channels vetted for anti-money-laundering compliance and built to bypass older correspondent networks. Sanctions relief therefore is functioning less as a restoration of sovereignty than as a new set of terms for membership, terms the Gulf states and Turkey are designating and shaping as decisively as sanctions once constrained them.
Across the three cases, sanctions produce the same underlying effect, one better described as dependency redistribution than as the intended economic isolation. They do more to relocate economic dependence than remove it, towards Beijing, Central Asian exchanges and unregulated code, deepening ties to whichever power controls the terms of reintegration. What each state is building is a form of parallel economic sovereignty and an attempt to reproduce the functions of the international financial system outside the network sanctions were designed to defend. Financial infrastructure, correspondent banking, stablecoin flows, tanker registries, IMF conditionality, all now function as contested geopolitical territory, with an increasingly greater hold than physical chokepoints ever were, as the states and firms behind building alternatives can relocate faster than sanctions regimes can be rewritten. For officials in Washington and Brussels, the question is shifting from whether a given package will succeed to whether the networks it pushes adversaries to build become permanent, creating alternative networks of power beyond the West.
Russia, Iran and Syria remain sovereign over their territory in the fullest legal sense; what has been renegotiated is their networked sovereignty. Each state’s economic future is being written elsewhere by actors its own government does not control, propelled by originating sanctions likewise set by powers further afield. The deeper risk in this case is that this is not a temporary condition but a signal of a global economy dividing into competing constellations of dependency rather than one system with occasional exceptions. Sovereignty over borders has not disappeared, but sovereignty over the networks that make borders economically meaningful is what is being renegotiated, case by case, and the fragmentation that follows may outlast the conflicts that produced them.
Nathan McAfee, Analista Colaborador
Sources Used:
Atlantic Council (2025). Charting a strategic path for Syria’s postwar reconstruction. Available at:https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/charting-a-strategic-path-for-syrias-post-war-reconstruction/
Elliptic (2026). The fall of A7A5: how sanctions strangled the ruble stablecoin. Available at:https://www.elliptic.co/insights/the-fall-of-a7a5-how-sanctions-strangled-the-ruble-stablecoin/
Farrell, H. and Newman, A.L. (2019) ‘Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion’, International Security, 44(1), pp. 42–79.
Global Trade and Sanctions Law (2026). EU Adopts 21st Sanctions Package Against Russia. https://www.globaltradeandsanctionslaw.com/eu-21st-sanctions-package-russia/
RFE/RL (2026). A7, Company Implicated In Sanctions Evasion, Reportedly Linked To Russian Oligarchs. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-cryptocurrency-a7a5-ilan-shor-investigation-sanction-evasion/33746026.html
Türkiye Today (2026). US lifting Syria sanctions moves country closer to reconstruction: President Sharaa. https://www.turkiyetoday.com/region/us-lifting-syria-sanctions-moves-country-toward-reconstruction-president-3226743
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (2026). China-Iran Fact Sheet: A Short Primer on the Relationship. https://www.uscc.gov/research/china-iran-fact-sheet-short-primer-relationship
U.S. Department of State (2026). U.S. Sanctions Tighten Grip on Iran-China Oil Trade. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/05/u-s-sanctions-tighten-grip-on-iran-china-oil-trade/
