Not Wearing Prada: Do Private Sanctions Reinforce Official Sanctions?

Following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, official trade sanctions were accompanied by private sanctions: voluntary decisions by firms to reduce or cease supplying the Russian market. This paper examines whether private sanctions curtailed trade beyond official restrictions. We use trademark information to connect transaction-level data on Russian imports with trademark owners’ public statements on their Russian operations. Imports linked to firms announcing private sanctions declined significantly relative to those associated with firms making no such commitments, indicating substantial compliance with withdrawal pledges. These declines also affected goods not covered by official sanctions, broadening the effective scope of trade restrictions, although third-country intermediation weakened the effects. The results are robust to instrumental-variable strategy exploiting variation in investor scrutiny, proxied by public listing status, and imply effects equivalent to ad valorem tariffs of 9–84 percent under plausible trade elasticities. These findings show that public pressure can have meaningful geopolitical consequences.