TRACER: Trade Redirection and Circumvention Evaluation Ranking
38 Countries | 85 Indicators | 4 Pillars | 61 Goods Categories | 2022–2024 Coverage
Why Another Index?
A central objective of the sanctions imposed on Russia is to reduce the country’s ability to sustain military aggression by limiting access to foreign technology, components, and equipment needed to produce advanced weapons. To achieve this, sanctioning countries have introduced and regularly expanded lists of goods considered critical to Russia’s military-industrial complex. Yet restricting these exports in practice has proven challenging. While direct exports of sanctioned goods to Russia declined, growing exports of the same goods to intermediary countries point to the emergence of alternative supply routes.
Sanctions Changed Trade Routes
Countries participating in sanctions have sharply reduced direct exports to Russia. At the same time, exports of many sanctioned goods increased toward intermediary countries such as Kazakhstan, Armenia, Serbia, Turkey, and Kyrgyzstan.
Trade Flows Alone Do Not Explain Evasion
Countries differ in geography, trade exposure, institutional capacity, and enforcement systems. Raw trade statistics alone cannot distinguish structural constraints from deliberate sanctions circumvention.
TRACER Measures Capacity and Risk
The index separates institutional capability from observed outcomes, allowing more meaningful comparisons across countries and helping identify where sanctions enforcement may be vulnerable.
What does the index measure?
TRACER measures the extent to which countries fall short of upholding export restrictions, after taking into account both their capacity to implement and enforce sanctions and the structural conditions that affect the risk of sanctions evasion.
The framework combines 85 indicators across 38 countries and is organized around four complementary pillars:
⚖️ Legal Frameworks
Measures the strength, clarity, and enforceability of sanctions-related laws, including criminal liability, penalties, judicial effectiveness, and rule-of-law institutions.
🏛️ Government Enforcement
Measures the capacity of public authorities to detect, investigate, and prevent sanctions violations through customs controls, anti-corruption systems, financial oversight, and regulatory enforcement.
🛡️ Corporate Compliance
Reflects the tools available to firms and financial institutions to identify sanctions risks, conduct due diligence, report suspicious activity, and prevent illicit transactions.
🌐 Structural Constraints
Captures factors that shape sanctions-evasion opportunities independently of institutional quality, including geography, trade exposure, border access, logistics networks, and economic openness.
Together, these four pillars provide a comparative assessment of a country’s sanctions enforcement capacity, while also helping explain why some countries face greater sanctions-evasion pressures than others. They furthermore serve as a diagnostic tool, helping countries identify areas of relative strength and weakness and prioritize reforms where improvements are most needed.
Why This Matters
The outcome we observe, the amount of restricted goods reaching Russia despite sanctions, is shaped by more than laws alone. Countries differ not only in the strength of their sanctions laws and enforcement institutions, but also in their trade networks, geographic position, and exposure to intermediary markets. As a result, strong institutions do not always produce low evasion risks, while countries with weaker institutional capacity may sometimes achieve better-than-expected outcomes.
TRACER helps distinguish between:
Institutional Capacity
Ability to enforce sanctions.
Structural Exposure
Vulnerability created by geography and trade networks.
Observed Outcomes
What actually happened in trade flows.
Not all variation can be explained by these factors. The remaining unexplained component may reflect differences in corporate compliance culture, due diligence practices, and the willingness of firms and individuals to identify and prevent sanctions circumvention. It may also capture adaptation by actors seeking to evade sanctions, including increasingly sophisticated methods of sourcing restricted goods, the creation of new intermediary networks, and alternative supply routes. Other geopolitical, economic, and logistical developments may likewise influence outcomes in ways that are difficult to observe directly. TRACER therefore distinguishes between the share of trade diversion that can be explained by institutional and structural factors and the residual component that reflects these broader behavioral and adaptive dynamics.
Capacity Is Not Outcome
Strong legal frameworks and enforcement institutions do not automatically translate into lower sanctions-evasion risks.
Trade Networks Matter
Geography, logistics hubs, and pre-war economic ties can create significant evasion pressures independent of institutional quality.
Behavior Changes Faster Than Institutions
Institutional capacity tends to evolve slowly, while evasion patterns can shift rapidly as firms on both sides adapt and trade routes change.
TRACER: Excessive Trade Diversion
TRACER captures the part of trade diversion that cannot be explained by institutions and structural conditions alone. By benchmarking observed outcomes against what would be expected given a country’s enforcement capacity and exposure to sanctions-evasion risks, the index highlights where countries perform better or worse than expected.
Over the years, countries move markedly up and down the distribution, indicating that realized outcomes are far less stable than structural vulnerability.
Because excessive trade diversion captures outcomes that cannot be explained by institutional capacity and other structural factors alone, variation in this measure likely reflects additional mechanisms that are more difficult to observe directly.
First, trade diversion routes are inherently dynamic and can change rapidly in response to geopolitical developments, regulatory actions, and disruptions to transportation and logistics networks.
Second, timing and learning effects matter. Countries that perform poorly in the early stages of sanctions implementation may subsequently improve as enforcement tightens and firms adapt, while deteriorating performance in later years may reflect the emergence of new evasion strategies, alternative supply chains, and adaptation by Russian procurement networks.
Third, transit and destination effects must be distinguished. Some countries may appear problematic because goods pass through them, rather than because domestic firms are the ultimate source of sanctions evasion.
Strong legal frameworks, effective enforcement institutions, and low structural exposure do not automatically translate into low sanctions-evasion risks. Countries may exhibit any combination of institutional capacity, structural exposure, and observed evasion outcomes, highlighting the importance of factors beyond formal institutions and geography alone.
High risk (Top-right)
Countries with both high structural vulnerability and high unexplained trade diversion. These are the most concerning cases, where institutional weaknesses and/or high exposure are compounded by worse-than-expected outcomes.
Strong Performers (Bottom-left)
Countries with low structural vulnerability and low trade diversion. These represent the strongest overall performers, combining favorable conditions with effective outcomes.
Underperformers (Top-left)
Countries with strong institutions and relatively low exposure, yet higher-than-expected trade diversion. These cases may point to enforcement gaps, compliance challenges, or emerging circumvention channels.
Positive Surprises (Bottom-right)
Countries with weaker institutions and/or higher exposure that nevertheless achieve better-than-expected outcomes. These cases may reflect particularly effective enforcement, strong compliance practices, or other mitigating factors.
Access the TRACER Dataset and Methodology
Download the full report to explore the complete methodology, findings, and country rankings. The report provides a detailed explanation of the methodology, data sources, analytical framework, and findings underlying the TRACER Index.
The report documents how the index was developed to assess countries’ capacity to support export sanctions against Russia, their structural exposure to sanction-evasion risks, and the trade outcomes observed between 2022 and 2024. It explains the construction of the four analytical pillars, the use of 85 indicators across 38 countries, and the statistical methods used to generate the final scores.
Readers will find methodological notes, indicator definitions, and a comprehensive discussion of the policy implications of sanctions compliance and evasion dynamics.