Financial institutions have been grappling with conflict-related sanctions and resultant risks for decades, including those that emerged in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the US and Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Yet the economic restrictions that the US, acting with the G7 and the EU, has rolled out in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are unprecedented in scale and scope. They represent “a new kind of economic statecraft with the power to inflict damage that rivals military might”, as US president Joe Biden put it, in a recent speech in Warsaw.

To risk managers, this not only signals how finance is being weaponised for foreign policy aims, placing them firmly in the crosshairs of geopolitical tensions; it also piles pressure on their businesses to get the risk management associated with the war in Ukraine right — to avoid falling foul of sanctions regimes.