Given time to work, export controls will play a crucial role in undermining Russia’s defense industry and eroding its military capabilities to wage the war. Russian manufacturing companies’ dependence on foreign components and machinery remains high, despite Moscow’s attempts to increase domestic self-sufficiency, such as the import substitution program it launched in 2015. With only limited domestic production of key technologies, Russia’s lifeline on the battlefield is to source these critical items from elsewhere. Export controls are thus a powerful tool to impede Russia’s ability to replenish its depleting stockpiles of weapons and ammunition.

Usually bundled together by nonspecialists, sanctions and export controls have a very different logic of operation. Unlike sanctions, which can halt trade and banking relations almost instantly, export controls are a softer tool directed at curtailing the target’s access to commodities and technologies. Export controls are almost never successful in completely suppressing technology transfers and do not permanently bar the target from catching up by other means—by achieving domestic production, evading controls via third countries, or getting help from controls-busting Western companies. The success of export controls therefore depends on the tightness of restrictions, uniqueness of each technology, and concentration of supply chains. As long as there are alternative suppliers in nonsanctioning countries, such as China and India, the impact of export controls will be weakened. Unilateral export controls are rarely effective, so international coordination is of the essence.

The Western allies had considerable experience in blocking the Soviet Union from access to sensitive technology. At the start of the Cold War, the West used multilateral export controls to halt the flows of strategic materials and technology to the communist bloc in order to prevent it from gaining military advantage. While the global technology landscape has undergone profound shifts since then, the core issues of export controls remain the same: how to balance national security and economic interests, how to ensure that all participating parties share the rationale behind the controls, how to right-size the scope so it’s neither too narrow nor too broad, and how to make sure the controls are efficiently administered. During the Cold War, this was accomplished by national authorities working with the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls—widely known as CoCom and shut down in 1994.