EXPORT CONTROL, DUAL USE AND INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC SANCTIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN CONFLICT

For more than a year, the territory of the European Union and its political, social and economic structure have been threatened by a conflict that broke out close to its borders and which has caused "history to fall back" at the gates of the Old World. As we said, the Russo-Ukrainian war represented a real breaking point for the international and continental economy, a highly globalized economy, dependent on the so-called “Value chains” and closely linked to the internationalization of industrial processes and raw material procurement.

In such a context, it is necessary to clarify, in order to provide a summary framework to the companies most affected by the measures put in place by the EU and by state actors, some concepts which, in this historical moment, have assumed a decisive and no longer negligible within almost all of the economic and productive dynamics that characterize our national and supranational dimension.

The first concept to analyze is that of international economic sanctions, especially those of European derivation, qualified by the European Council as "the set of restrictions concerning specific sectors of economic activity, including bans on the import-export of certain goods, bans on providing certain services, etc.”. The measures adopted by the EU against the Russian Federation until today, having reached the tenth round, approved on 25 February 2023 and constantly updated, involve the following activities: the export of strategic goods and services, technical assistance and finance, the freezing of assets and the ban on entering european territory for a number of entities and persons, the airspace clousure and the freezing of international reserves of the Central Bank of Russia and, lastly, the exclusion of some Russian banks from the Swift-International Payment System.

In particular, with reference to the block or drastic downsizing for the export of strategic goods and services, the second element of this contribution comes to mind: the activity of export control. This is the discipline that intervenes in order to regulate and, if necessary, place restrictions in the field of international trade, with a specific focus on the export’s subject. The export control activity is made up of a structured corpus of regulations of both national and supranational origin, issued with the precise aim of limiting or prohibiting international trade concerning those categories of goods and technologies which, potentially, may be dangerous and which are adopted against countries or organizations that are defined as critical to international security and hostile to geopolitical stability. This organic system of rules includes regulatory elements of technical nature, which operate as a limitation on the use of precise and specific components or physical elements (for example weapons or the so-called "dual use goods") and a series of subjective restrictions on third countries, non-governmental organizations or other types of organizations, up to natural persons, aimed at limiting and hindering their economic capacity or the supply of technological material.

Closely connected to the issue of export control, is that inherent to the so-called "dual use" goods. The dual use of goods is precisely governed by European legislation and, precisely, EU Reg. 821/2021, which entered into force on 9 September 2021. This Regulation governs export operations concerning those types of products made for civil or industrial purposes but which, by virtue of their characteristics, could potentially be used for military purposes and, therefore, this particular type of goods requires further and specific authorizations granted by the supervisory authority set up for this purpose from each member country. EU Reg. 821/2021, which replaced the one in force up to then, i.e. EU Reg. 428/2009, with the aim of tightening up the export, transfer, intermediation, technical assistance and the transit of dual use products, with the aim of intensifying the fight against terrorism and countering human rights violations, has sadly proved to be an essential tool for the rapid application of the sanction restrictions against the Russian Federation at the time of the outbreak of the hostilities in February 2022.