this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Where do you base the number of half a million deaths due to US-EU sanctions on? Because I know the EU uses sanctions, but not (at least explicitly) with the intention of causing wide scale hunger.
The source for the half a million (actually 560k a year) comes from this recent study in The Lancet medical journal. It takes into account 50 years of sanction policy and arrives to that figure of murders, yearly, since 1971.
Good on you for questioning the sources, I love seeing people critical of online figures.
The actual study and not just the short article is https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00189-5/fulltext. However, I don't really find the claim backed that the EU is a major factor in that regard:
Not very familiar with how to read the data, but to me, EU sanctions have no really significant impact on mortality in any of these specifications that would allow to construct a hard causality; there is almost no entry for EU sanctions in table 3 where there's a statistical significance, except for "Child mortality (5–10 years)" in Specifications 3 and 4, where it barely reaches the threshold (p=0.051 and p=0.052); in the latter, the UN sanctions have a MUCH higher correlation.
Not exactly sure how one can come to the conclusion that this is US+EU sanctions when there's such a difference between those when viewed in isolation… that said, a correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, e.g. let's say there's a civil war and the government gets sanctioned, then you do have a correlation between deaths and the sanctions, but it's the former that caused the latter and not the other way around.
That said, I'm not disagreeing that sanctions can't have negative effect on a population, in fact it's the normal people getting hit first because usually the targets of sanctions will make sure it's their citizens suffering and not themselves
What's your point? "EU should keep sanctioning people"? Or "Sanctions aren't mathematically proven to kill people even if there are extremely strong correlations and obvious mechanism through which this happens"?
Thanks for the source, interesting read. Makes me question sanction more. Haha, well here on Lemmy you can have a conversation when asking clarification, so thank you as well :)