How about stop working with them and funding the murder of Ukrainians through your tax dollars?

Seriously though if your business is impacted by sanctions I'd suggest consulting a lawyer before trying to get creative with payment methods.

Isn't the point of this sanction to keep people from doing things like that?

You could go for a fancy money transfer option. Western Union, Ria or transfer wise would be options at the top of my head. If those get shut down as well it is likely that continued business with Russians would be in violation of sanctions anyways so you might want to consult a lawyer.

Alternatively you could just mail the money there. As in, put it in a letter and hand it to your national postal service. That said, this is not possible in all countries and sometimes restrictions apply that may make this unusable.

That said, if you are hellbent on continuing to use that contractor crypto is an option. I recommend something more modern and easy to use than Bitcoin though.

Bitcoin. People may complain about the volatility, but you only have to hold it long enough to send it, and they only have to hold it long enough to sell, if that's what they care to do.

Beware that this might count as circumventing US sanctions by the time they're done writing these new regulations.

hire someone from Ukraine

PayPal still works as far as I know. But yeah. Bitcoin is the go to. Ironically I have workers in both and I send bitcoin to ukraine because all other means are expensive and get questioned a lot.

Yeah I have workers in both too. The two I’ve got in Ukraine I've run through Upwork as they seem to have had that handled in the past and we cover the Upwork percentage.

I’ll have to check with the comfort level of my guys taking bitcoin but that seems like an option at least. Don’t want to think about the accounting issues we will have to figure out but thanks for the idea.