The CEU Center for European Neighborhood Studies (CENS) together with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung hosted a conference on 21 November 2016 entitled “The state of the Russian Economy and Russia’s development path”.

The goal of this conference was to explore and discuss the current state and the future prospects of the Russian economy, from the perspective of recent geopolitical trends and EU and US imposed sanctions.  Since there is no consensus on what actually qualifies as sanction, in this context, the conference served as a platform to discuss its different understandings. The debates focused on finding out whether the sactions (and counter-sanctions) were efficacious and on identifying their potential negative effects for all stakeholders.