Democrats, don’t forget: These new sanctions could save lives

A bipartisan sanctions bill would hit the regimes that terrorize us. The House should pass it.

September 15, 2026 at 6:45 a.m. 

The Washington Post

By Oleksandra Matviichuk and Masih Alinejad

Oleksandra Matviichuk is the head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Masih Alinejad is an Iranian journalist, author and women’s rights campaigner.

From left: Photos of killed Iranian protesters, at a D.C. rally on Jan. 16, 

and photos of killed Ukrainians, in Kyiv in 2023. 

(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images; Ed Ram/For The Washington Post)

The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act provides Congress the best opportunity in almost two years to pass major new sanctions against Russia and extend long-standing sanctions against Iran. As two activists who have devoted our lives to defending human rights in our countries — one of us, a Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the other, an Iranian journalist who has survived multiple assassination attempts — we urge lawmakers to swiftly pass this bill.

The bill deserves bipartisan support because it will cut off financing for the Russian industries that fund the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine, while extending a narrow, long-standing provision targeting the brutal Iranian regime. If enacted, both of these policies will save Ukrainian and Iranian lives.

For both the Russian and Iranian regimes, human rights violations are not the work of a few sadistic individuals; they are instruments of state policy implemented across every level of power. Russia’s abuses against Ukrainian civilians, including torture, sexual violence, forcible deportation and execution, are systematic and widespread. The country’s oil and gas industry bankrolls these crimes. In March, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab found that Russia’s largest oil and gas companies, Gazprom and Rosneft, directly subsidized the relocation and pro-Russian indoctrination of more than 2,000 Ukrainian children. This is a war crime — and Russian business is financing it.

Economic measures, including those provisions incorporated in the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, can help curb these horrific human rights abuses by depriving those responsible of revenue. This legislation would sanction some of the biggest facilitators of Russia’s war, including the Central Bank of Russia, Gazprombank, VTB Bank and Sberbank.

We know sanctions work against Russia simply by observing what follows in their absence: After the United States issued sanctions waivers on Russian crude this spring, Russian oil export revenue rose to $2.48 billion, its highest level since April 2022 and up 120 percent from late the previous month. That revenue filled the coffers of state-owned enterprises that fund the deportation, indoctrination and forced adoption of Ukrainian children.

One of Russia’s victims is Rostislav, a then-16-year-old Ukrainian boy whom Russian authorities forcibly took to a “summer camp” after taking his mother away to a medical facility. When he refused to sing the Russian national anthem at the camp, authorities made him stay in a six-foot-square cell for days at a time with no access to a phone and no permission to leave. We know his story because he was able to escape, but the fate of tens of thousands of other Ukrainian children is still unknown. Passing this bill will prevent those children from experiencing these same horrors.

As in Russia, industry funds Tehran’s security forces’ egregious abuses against civilians. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has become one of the most powerful entities operating across Iran’s entire economy, with stakes in energy, banking, shipping, manufacturing and consumer imports. In 2022 and earlier this year, it led brutal crackdowns against peaceful anti-government protesters. The government itself acknowledged killing thousands of people demonstrating in the streets.

One of its victims in 2022 was a 16-year-old girl named Nika Shakarami, who removed her hijab in public and burned it. For this act of civil disobedience, the authorities arrested her, tortured her and killed her. The profits from Iran’s state-controlled economy finance the forces that killed this teenage girl and the forces that send drones to Putin to kill Ukrainians.

Yet the legislative measures that keep money out of the pockets of Iran’s government killers are slated to expire. The Iran provision in this bill would extend those long-standing financial restrictions against the country’s state-controlled energy sector, a policy that has enjoyed bipartisan support for three decades.

Members of Congress must confront the fact that the Russian and Iranian regimes have long enabled one another’s abuses. In the earliest months of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Iran supplied the country with Shahed drones to launch at civilian targets in Ukraine. Now, thanks to Iran’s support, Russia operates its own version, sometimes launching almost 1,000 of these drones at Ukrainian cities in a single day. Russia has responded in kind and at scale. Since the war with Iran started earlier this year, Moscow has provided Tehran with valuable intelligence to target U.S. troops in the Middle East and has also helped replenish Tehran’s weapons stockpiles.

Some Democratic members of Congress oppose this bill because it includes provisions allowing for import duties of up to 100 percent on the world’s top five purchasers of Russian energy and the top five facilitators of Russian oil sanctions evasion. As we are human rights defenders, not international trade experts, we can speak only from where we sit: one of us under daily threat of Russian missiles and Iranian drones, and the other fearing another assassination attempt from agents of the Iranian regime. Every day this bill is delayed, Russian and Iranian oil and gas fund the disappearance of more children and the extrajudicial killing of more civilians. 

Democrats building opposition to this bill cannot claim solidarity with civilians at risk one week and undermine tough sanctions against Moscow and Tehran the next. No bill is perfect, but the cost of delay will be measured in human lives.

Freedom for the Ukrainian and Iranian people depends on every “yes” vote in the House of Representatives. We were encouraged to see this legislation pass the Senate 86-11, an overwhelming bipartisan majority, and were heartened to hear President Donald Trump signal that he would sign it. The House is now the final hurdle to making this bill a law. Every day of delay means more crimes against humanity for both of us to document. Every “no” vote is a vote against cutting off the resources Russia and Iran need to sustain their violence. Ukrainians and Iranians are watching. We urge House Democrats to show them what true solidarity looks like.

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