WESTERN SANCTIONS: The Silent War Killing 500K+ People Every Year
A groundbreaking new study published in The Lancet has forced the world to confront the true human cost of US and EU sanctions.
Key findings:
Since 1971, economic sanctions have caused an estimated 564,258 deaths per year on average
That’s 5 times more than annual battlefield deaths in the same period
Sanctions drive a 3.1% annual increase in infant mortality and 6.4% rise in maternal mortality
The mechanism is brutally simple: blocked access to medicines, food, medical equipment, and healthcare infrastructure
The most devastating paradox:
Despite targeting roughly one-quarter of all countries between 2010–2022, sanctions achieve their stated political or economic goals only ~30% of the time (per independent meta-analyses).
In other words:
A policy tool with a 70% failure rate consistently delivers a near-100% humanitarian catastrophe on civilian populations — especially children, pregnant women, and the chronically ill.
This is not collateral damage.
This is the primary mechanism of modern sanctions: mass deprivation disguised as pressure on governments.
The Lancet study is the first comprehensive, peer-reviewed attempt to quantify the body count across decades of sanctions regimes. The numbers are staggering, and the conclusion is inescapable:
Western sanctions are one of the deadliest forms of foreign policy in modern history.
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