When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the West responded with the most sweeping restrictions imposed on a major economy since 1945. This has transformed the theory and practice of economic statecraft, Russia’s political economy, and global economic relations.

It also marks the latest in a long series of Western attempts to shape Russia’s capabilities and intentions by controlling its access to economic flows – from early Cold War isolation, through Ostpolitik, détente and post-communist integration, to the return of isolation.

Reshaping Russia is the first study to trace this long arc of Western strategy. Drawing on archives, interviews and the author’s policy experience, it shows what worked, what failed and why, and what each era reveals about the uses and limits of economic power. It concludes with wider lessons, far beyond Russia, for a world in which ‘adversary economic statecraft has come of age’.

Nigel Gould-Davies is Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He previously served as British ambassador to Belarus, head of the Economics Section in Moscow, and project director in the Foreign Office strategy unit. He has also held senior government-relations roles in the energy industry in Central and Southeast Asia, and taught politics and international relations at the University of Oxford. He has held visiting fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Bank of Finland. He is author of Tectonic Politics: Global Political Risk in an Age of Transformation (Brookings, 2019). His PhD was awarded Harvard University’s Sumner Prize for the best dissertation in international relations.