Recent studies show that properly designed economic sanctions can force the target to refrain from violating international norms. However, policy-makers are not enabled to integrate this finding in their ex ante assessments whether more intensive coercive measures could prevent military coups, human rights violations, or a war of aggression such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this article, we address this shortcoming of the conflict forecasting literature and introduce counterfactual predictions to answer the what if-question of whether adequate sanctions by the European Union and the United States could have provoked targets to abandon severe norms violations. To this end, a training data set for the period from 1989 to 2008 is used to predict the incidence, intensity, and success of sanctions from 2009 to 2015. Our policy counterfactuals for key sanction cases demonstrate that stricter EU coercion against Russia after the annexation of Crimea could have triggered policy concessions from the regime of President Putin.