I used to believe strongly in financial sanctions over war but I'm becoming more skeptical. Markets and industry are a very hard thing to constrain at a global scale. To do it effectively you basically encourage a giant financial surveillance state and need put huge pressure on partner countries - who often don't even implement it meaningfully. You make business harder for everyone and create lucrative black market organize crime business.
Military action is appearing more preferable to that.
> In the wake of the February 2022 invasion, Ukraine's allies imposed sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. The US and UK banned Russian oil and gas, while the EU banned Russian seaborne crude imports, but not gas.
> Despite this, by 29 May, Russia had made more than €883bn ($973bn; £740bn) in revenue from fossil fuel exports since the start of the full-scale invasion, including €228bn from the sanctioning countries, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
> The lion's share of that amount, €209bn, came from EU member states.
Meaning 3 years into the war Europe is still sending more $$ to Russia for gas than they send Ukraine in aid
25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like.
He recently revisited that in FP magazine (https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi...) arguing for keeping sanctions on Russia even though they clearly aren't going to coerce Russia into abandoning their war in Ukraine. The first reason is to re-enforce the global norm against territorial expansion. We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce. And the other reason is to weaken their economy for the grinding war of attrition that is currently happening, and not make territorial expansion easy for them.
> 25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like.
Sanctions are a negative-rate compounding system. Sarah Paine from the US Naval War College:
> People look at sanctions and go, “Oh, they don't work because you don't make whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing.” What they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's annoying you over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea. It's powerful over several generations.
And what difference have North Korean sanctions made geopolitically? North and South Korea are nowhere near a peaceful resolution, and North Korea has advanced its nuclear arsenal significantly, with a repertoire that could even hit US coastal cities.
North Korean citizens have now normalized to poverty and destitution after generations of sanctions. There are quite a few of them working alongside the South Asian labour force in the Middle East, engaged in slavish labour that the Gulf nations are often criticized for.
The stronger military doesn't matter when NK has nuclear weapons, which deter any "unification efforts". Sure, South Koreans are doing great, but what difference did sanctions make to the lives of North Koreans?
You seem to be looking for some other outcome. NK with the economy of SK would have been a nuclear threat decades ago and would be stockpiling more nuclear weapons than the US has given their relative GDP allocations..
Would it be nice if sanctions were equivalent to invasion and does that matter to the argument that they are better to implement than do nothing?
North Korea has no dearth of access to nuclear weapons. They get enough raw material from countries other than Canada and the tech they need from China, Pakistan and now Russia. So no, sanctions have not harmed their nuclear programme.
But what they've done is worsen the lot for the layman North Korean.
North Korea was already a nuclear threat decades ago. Where they were lagging behind was in ICBMs that could reach the continental United States.
North Korea's nuclear program has been slow and you give financial ability as a way out of it.. Decades ago is still decades late, then there is the dollar short aspect of their program.
I still have no idea what you think is an alternative that would have made a North Korea with South Korea's economy a great thing for arms control.
Keeping North Korea poor has all been waste of time unless our goal was to have 75 years of "wasted time" before a potentially uncontrollable escalation with China.
The thing is, sanctions damage both the sanctioned nation and the sanctioner.
I'm not really optimistic about western Europe's willingness to absorb damage in it economy in order to damage Russia. France's government expenditures are 55% of GDP, much of it financed by borrowing. That's the level maintained by major powers in the world wars. Can the French state demand more from a private sector that's funding the equivalent of a total war?
Worse yet, western European politics gives you the strong impression all these expenditures are necessary to prevent the election of a pro-Russian government or a bloody revolution.
Hence why sanctions seem to be something of a joke.
Military operations would do that as well. Ukraine is destroying Russia's oil and gas industry right now. Sanctions or not, that oil and gas is becoming unavailable. Either way, preventing innocent Ukrainians being slaughtered with your money will do harm to your economy; continuing to get cheap oil from Russia inevitably pays for evil.
Might as well do whatever is most effective, which is likely to be harsh sanctions followed by military action to fully enforce them.
Yeah, it seems hard to say military intervention is preferable to increased accounting and recordkeeping requirements. Or maybe sheltered is a better way to put. Which is a good thing! For most people alive on Earth right now haven't had to deal with wars of territorial expansion. Yes wars exist, and yes territorial expansion by military might conitnues, and military occupations from the US certainly don't help. But overall we're in a point of relative stability.
There is no 80-year norm against redrawing borders. 80 years ago, Crimea was a part of the Russian SSR - now it's part of a free and independent Ukraine.
Eastern Europe looks a heck of a lot different, as did British India.
In all fairness, 80 years ago, the world was on the cusp of a massive border redraw, but the Phillipine Islands were still a US territory.
> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce
The previous Russian imperial project, the Soviet Union, ended 35 years ago, not 80. It's easy to overlook that they forcibly redrew borders and kept them redrawn for decades (and still to this day do keep some territories they conquered in imperialist wars when they were still allied with Nazi Germany).
It's not like ww2 where you have increasingly fewer people who were old enough to consciously experience it. It's very likely that most people on this forum were around for the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian imperialism.
> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce.
Cool story bro. Almost like Kosovo never happened.
I don't know what the situation is now. but one of the more surreal aspects of the war was how the gas pipelines through Ukraine were kept open. Ukraine desperately needed the transit fees. and Russia desperately needed to sell it's gas. So here they were, in the middle of a war, still doing business with each other.
The reason for that is simple - Russia started its invasion _after_ making Europe dependent on its gas. In Ukraine a lot of people predicted that the war is inevitable after the latest north stream is finished.
The reduction of purchase of gas from Russia did significantly impacted energy prices across EU to the point of populist far-right pro-russia governments rising in popularity (even though that is not the only reason).
So Russia and China has a long term strategy of subverting the west and we are just reacting when there are no good options available.
But, sanctions do work. The problem is that the economic power of the west is comparable these days to "global north".
Russia did not make Europe dependent on them for gas. Europe freely made that choice, even going so far as to do away with existing alternatives like nuclear in Germany. Trump even warned them. They had a wonderful time laughing at him while proclaiming the ignorant orange buffoon didn't understand Europe. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Everyone then pretended Europe didn't make itself vulnerable while also ridiculing anyone who dared sound an alarm about the potential danger.
Europe wasn't forced. Europe chose and chose freely. Europe chose poorly.
Yes, but if you remember, the consensus was that countries with economic ties don't go to wars. There were no illusions about Russia, but the idea was to tame it by making it prosper through trade with "rich EU".
A lot of people were calling this strategy stupid, but that was the consensus for multiple decades.
You can also tell that the strategy with China failed in exactly the same way.
So I think the world will be a very different place in the next millennia.
The EU parliament has "admitted" no such thing. But it would be great if the US provided some clandestine support for destroying Russian infrastructure. Burn it all.
Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions, that wouldn't encourage as much routing around. Tax Russian oil/gas at the max point in the Laffer (-esque) curve, with all the revenue flowing as direct aid to Ukraine.
(I know 'tariff' has become a dirty word these days to due the obvious abuse, but I swear I'm making this comment in good faith)
Europe kept buying Russian oil and gas, because other sources could not come online quickly enough. Tariffs would have only made energy even more expensive than it already was. Now it's mostly Hungary and Slovakia buying Russian energy, as well as some LNG imports. Those two countries are not too keen on sanctioning Russia, especially in ways that would hurt their economy. Any attempts to impose tariffs on energy imports from Russia would have led to a major internal crisis in the EU.
The US already started to pressure these two. We'll see how it goes. Ukraine could always blow up or sabotage the pipelines or some of the pumping stations if they think it's appropriate, either in Russia or on their own territory.
It’s frankly a pretty bold bet to count on these pipelines existing for years to come. It might have been smarter for Hungary and Slovakia to scramble for other sources of energy, starting March 2022.
There were essentially no sanctions impacting Russian energy exports to Europe. Those would have hurt Europe much more than Russia. If you can't export something, the damage is proportional to the volume of the exports. But if you don't have enough energy, your entire economy suffers.
The increases in energy prices mostly came from voluntary attempts to find alternatives to Russian energy and from Russia constraining the supply.
Coersion. A comparatively small amount of revenue being given up could scare Europe away from supplying Ukraine with materiel. The Russians put out ads about how Europe would be freezing through winter.
Because suddenly the oil isn't Russian anymore but Indian or something like that. Here's[1] an article going into how after the 2014 sanctions suddenly a lot of tropical fruits started growing in Belarussia, or how the landlocked country suddenly started exporting tons of Belarusian shrimp.
> Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions
There are still some qualitative differences: With sanctions, you'll know something dodgy has occurred when you find a pallet of My Little Putin dolls traveling through the port, you don't need to call up a bunch of lawyers and accountants.
That said, I readily admit that oil is a lot more disguise-able and fungible.
Russia is the third largest oil producing country, this plan was never going to work because oil is a fungible resource. Sure you can stop buying from Russia and buy from someone else, but that just kicks off a game of musical chairs where everyone is backfilling from someone else and eventually _someone_ is buying from Russia to make everything whole. If Russia was some insignificant player the world could have frozen them out entirely but they simply produce too much oil for the world to absorb the loss of all of it.
Everyone is aware that Russian crude oil will still enter the market through various channels regardless of sanctions. The point of sanctions is just to slightly reduce Russian government revenue. In combination with other measures this provides some leverage in negotiations over a peace settlement.
> The point of sanctions is just to slightly reduce Russian government revenue. In combination with other measures this provides some leverage in negotiations over a peace settlement.
How's that working out? Apparently someone miscalculated.
Be careful of the goal. Sanctions are unlikely to directly bring someone to the bargaining table. Sanctions make is harder to get the things Russia needs to fight way. It will take years to catch up, but Russia has a smaller economy. Russia has mostly stopped using tanks because they can only make a few of them (1-3 per day depending on what source you ask), and they have no ability to make more, sanctions are part of this.
The real question is what if there were none - Russia would have more money and thus have done a lot more damage to Ukraine - but there is no way to measure damage they could have done.
> The point of sanctions is just to slightly reduce Russian government revenue. In combination with other measures this provides some leverage in negotiations over a peace settlement.
The words you apparently missed from what GP wrote are: "slightly reduce" and "some leverage". Nobody said that sanctions end wars or bring about peace negotiations on their own.
The idea is to incessantly put pressure on their economy until it breaks or adapts. At which point you put more pressure until they become the DPRK or Iran.
Right, that would be a good outcome. North Korea and Iran are annoyances but not existential threats and they have minimal capability to project power far outside their borders. The goal should be to cripple and impoverish Russia through a sustained policy of maximum cruelty that includes everything short of kinetic attacks.
This is how we will lose this war. 'Everyone knows it is fake', probably the authorities too. But dealing with it in modern bureaucracy will take years, by which time another fake insurer is up and running.
A big part of the problem here is that ships and trips that don't by the numbers benefit from buying insurance are being forced to so there's a whole ecosystem of various shades of sketchy insurance insuring all sorts of mundane things and so sketchy insurance is a poor heuristic for "they might be up to no good, it's worth looking into them".
There's an artificially oversized haystack the needles are hiding in.
It’s important to follow due process. We need more checks and balances, not fewer. Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly.
We need to follow the process. And the process should be extensive. This is a problem of not enough process. Ideally, we could have more.
> Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly.
Does Norway even have juries? At least in Sweden we don't have any juries in court (and the two countries tend to be more similar than not), so while the overall comment sounds fitting (and I agree), some details seem to miss the detail of what country this is about :)
Nämndemän (Lay Judges) are nothing like juries, at least how I understand juries. In lower courts (tingsrätt), those people are appointed by the city council, and the people chosen are often politically involved (yet the appointment is "unpolitical"), they're not just "randoms" who got called to be in the jury, like how I understand the juries in the US to work.
Due process needs to be a lot faster and it could be. Things which warrant immediate action are delayed by months, years, or decades by wildly inefficient and slow processes that have nothing to do with someone's right to fair judgement.
We shouldn’t rush to judgment. A few years sounds like a good period of time for things that could affect someone’s life. One could argue it should take a century or more to convict people of such crimes. How can we be sure it’s not politically motivated? Only way is to ensure that we wait for political change and see if the crime is still to be prosecuted.
It’s crazy how modern and complex company structures became impossible to govern.
There are so many cases in which criminals just open a ton of new companies, to overload the authorities. Until the authorities shut something down, they moved on three times already.
Which Ro Marine didn't have- but they submitted forged documents to Panama and other countries claiming they did. When you have the resources of a nation-state, forging documents from other countries is straight-forward: you can all buy roughly the same stamps, etc. from the same sources, for your own documents. So changing a stamp or two to look like Norway's stamps isn't too difficult.
Getting ports around the world to check back with the originating agency on every document they look at... would be a lot of extra work.
Is sending a plausible looking letter really all that's required? Does nobody ever call back to the Insurance Association of Norway (whatever they may be called) and check references? I mean, we check job seeker's references regularly.
We have the tech to solve most of this (digital signatures, digitally signed public DBs -aka Blockchain) but the state bureaucracy apparatus can't figure that out for various reasons.
Only because punishment isn't harsh and quick enough for the initial offenders. The state fell short on that, and hence created an arbitrage opportunity.
With all the broadband communications and high definition video and audio, it should have been trivial to prove the fraud and disincentivize committing it by sufficiently punishing it.
Punishment often doesn't matter. Until someone notices, it's finished already for a long time. People are disposable, and some just take the risk to go to prison for a lot of money. It's often possible to disappear into another country, before the authorities start to figure out what's happening.
>The state fell short on that, and hence created an arbitrage opportunity
The state fell short on that because everyone hates violence so there isn't the political will to deploy it at the drop of a hat multiplied by everyone's pet issues.
The state "technically could" do a lot of stuff but it doesn't because doing even a small subset of those things more than it does would destabilize it.
First, when I buy mandatory car insurance, police can check its validity in seconds. I'd expect international shipping to be at least at that level of strictness.
Second, how insurance can help avoid sanctions? The enforcement should look at the goods source and destination, not on who insured them, right?
The URL and HTML title element have the current HN title, "Over 100 ships have sailed with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine." But FWIW, the Open Graph title meta element is "NRK reveals: Russian used Norwegian company to fool the West."
I like the Tom Clancy vibes of this. There’s a Sum of All Fears in there somewhere.
On a more serious note this reminds me of the crime occurring in Canada. They have a car theft pipeline in place with paperwork at the MOT level. The cars end up being shipped to Africa in less time than you might think - this is one outcome, but there are others. Nobody really “cares” enough even though one of the mayors stated everyone they know in their neighborhood has had their car stolen.
Canada also recommended to leave residential doors unlocked with the car keys in plain sight to reduce the chances of property damage and personal harm when the thieves come for your car, so Canada can get stuffed.
I thought this was made up nonsense, but for those who are thinking the same thing as me, a Toronto police officer really recommended doing exactly this [0].
Recently a man was shot and killed in a home invasion defending his family (also in Ontario). The police first claimed it was a targeted killing (implying the man was a gang member), then when that turned out false, the police said you should comply with home invaders instead of resisting...
So.. I live in Ontario. And I actually agree with that statement. Why would you resist and risk your life instead of just complying? Material things aren't worth actually getting hurt over.
The implication that "the police say this because they can't stop the crime" is IMO not the right take-away. The correct take-away is that a certain level of crime is unavoidable in practice, and you should prioritize your life over your property.
The problem with this line of thinking is that home invasion is a different kind of crime from breaking and entering.
With breaking and entering, the goal is to get what they can with a minimum of fuss. Locked doors, barking dogs, automatic lights, security systems, etc are all great deterrents, because the goal is to get as much as possible while avoiding capture. The table stakes are that the burglar can get in and out without getting caught.
With home invasion, the whole threat profile is different. The operating premise is that the invader will use violence or the threat of it to brutalize the home occupants into facilitating the theft, the escape, and avoidance of prosecution.
Think of how wild animals engage in violence: they will not enter into a violent situation unless trapped (either physically, or by circumstance - e.g. fight or starve), or they think they can win the fight without sustaining any substantial injury. In the case of a home invasion, you are trapped, but the other guy has chosen the fight.
All of that to say, compliance should be done in the light of keeping yourself and those around you together and unharmed, and not willy-nilly. Obviously, don't pick a fight over a TV. But understand that if they continue their breaking-and-entering after they know you're there, compliance may be insufficient to protect your life.
Agreed with you actually. This might be me not being a native English speaker, and 'home invasion' and 'breaking and entering' where the same thing in my mind. But with the differences between the two that you've highlighted here, I do agree that different situations require different approaches.
The entire point is that in a home invasion, you have no guarantee the criminal is only interested in your property. If someone deliberately busts into an occupied house, there is a nonzero chance they are also interested in killing or assaulting (sexually or otherwise) the occupants.
Armed intruders can demand something one minute and something else the next. They may be mentally deranged, they may be sexually devious, there's a good chance they don't have a lot of moral limitations. The issue is not material things. That there's an optimal approach to dealing with them, when you're unarmed, is just not true. You must do what seems best given the situation.
It's good advice. Losing a car is much less worse than personal injury or worse. Everybody's a toughguy until a methhead who can't feel pain stabs you 15 times. Should the police crack down? Sure, but they aren't magicians, crime isn't gonna magically dissolve tomorrow. In the mean time, keep yourself safe by not inviting harm.
I'm living in a third-world country and I think this is madness. It's unimaginable here, to be afraid of "methheads" so much and giving up on your own property. I never saw "methhead" in my life, but I sure would do my best to protect my valuable property. May be I need to work more to buy a car, compared to average Canadian, I don't know.
Most people think and do use for to protect themselves from threats like all humans.
The issue was bringing the US style castle doctrine defence argument where some folks feel that since the intruder is trespassing they have carte blanche to murder them.
Are you able to unpack that more? Are people not proud of themselves and their culture? Do they not want to prioritize the safety of themselves and their possessions?
Yeah one time there was maintenance in the subway and they ran substitute buses, and it was also a super rainy day, and I got into the bus, sat down, looked to my right and there was a guy sleeping on the back seat, but you couldn't see him unless you were actually up close, so people kept coming up trying to sit, but then they saw (and smelled) the guy sleeping there and made funny faces lol.
When the government can't succeed in making public transit appealing, I guess they fall back on letting thieves steal everybody's cars so people have no other choice, Lmao.
For some context, I strongly encourage you to read "90% of everything" by Rose George. It is a brilliant expose of the shipping industry, and it's a really bad industry. Flags of convenience, forcing people to work on ships, not paying them, not even really caring if they fall overboard. The international shipping industry is damn near a hate crime.
The second sentence of the article answers the fake insurance bit; "did not have permission to sell insurance but did it anyway".
If you click the (helpfully underlined) first use of "shadow fleet" in the article it defines it for you. (Or ask Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_fleet)
I feel like TFA answers the fake insurance question pretty well. The company sold "insurance" which was not actually insurance. They were providing a cover for ships selling from a sanctioned country. Those ships were required to have insurance, and no legitimate business would insure them.
Definitely no. The "fake" here is about certainty that no insurance payout would occur in case of issue, meaning for example an oil tanker accidently dumping tons of black goo onto some english seaside resort, no compensation would come out of anywhere.
Nah. The smaller new ones reinsure via folks like Lloyds. It’s quite complex.
The company in this article could have done that, but they forged documents to avoid it. They had no intention of covering accidents - it was just plain fake to get these ships into ports.
I used to believe strongly in financial sanctions over war but I'm becoming more skeptical. Markets and industry are a very hard thing to constrain at a global scale. To do it effectively you basically encourage a giant financial surveillance state and need put huge pressure on partner countries - who often don't even implement it meaningfully. You make business harder for everyone and create lucrative black market organize crime business.
Military action is appearing more preferable to that.
For example:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxk454kxz8o
> In the wake of the February 2022 invasion, Ukraine's allies imposed sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. The US and UK banned Russian oil and gas, while the EU banned Russian seaborne crude imports, but not gas.
> Despite this, by 29 May, Russia had made more than €883bn ($973bn; £740bn) in revenue from fossil fuel exports since the start of the full-scale invasion, including €228bn from the sanctioning countries, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
> The lion's share of that amount, €209bn, came from EU member states.
Meaning 3 years into the war Europe is still sending more $$ to Russia for gas than they send Ukraine in aid
25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like.
He recently revisited that in FP magazine (https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi...) arguing for keeping sanctions on Russia even though they clearly aren't going to coerce Russia into abandoning their war in Ukraine. The first reason is to re-enforce the global norm against territorial expansion. We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce. And the other reason is to weaken their economy for the grinding war of attrition that is currently happening, and not make territorial expansion easy for them.
> 25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like.
Sanctions are a negative-rate compounding system. Sarah Paine from the US Naval War College:
> People look at sanctions and go, “Oh, they don't work because you don't make whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing.” What they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's annoying you over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea. It's powerful over several generations.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcVSgYz5SJ8&t=29m03s
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_C._M._Paine
And what difference have North Korean sanctions made geopolitically? North and South Korea are nowhere near a peaceful resolution, and North Korea has advanced its nuclear arsenal significantly, with a repertoire that could even hit US coastal cities.
North Korean citizens have now normalized to poverty and destitution after generations of sanctions. There are quite a few of them working alongside the South Asian labour force in the Middle East, engaged in slavish labour that the Gulf nations are often criticized for.
SK has a stronger military than NK and twice the population. Of course a large part of that is internal economic failure due to central planning.
The stronger military doesn't matter when NK has nuclear weapons, which deter any "unification efforts". Sure, South Koreans are doing great, but what difference did sanctions make to the lives of North Koreans?
You seem to be looking for some other outcome. NK with the economy of SK would have been a nuclear threat decades ago and would be stockpiling more nuclear weapons than the US has given their relative GDP allocations..
Would it be nice if sanctions were equivalent to invasion and does that matter to the argument that they are better to implement than do nothing?
North Korea has no dearth of access to nuclear weapons. They get enough raw material from countries other than Canada and the tech they need from China, Pakistan and now Russia. So no, sanctions have not harmed their nuclear programme.
But what they've done is worsen the lot for the layman North Korean.
North Korea was already a nuclear threat decades ago. Where they were lagging behind was in ICBMs that could reach the continental United States.
North Korea's nuclear program has been slow and you give financial ability as a way out of it.. Decades ago is still decades late, then there is the dollar short aspect of their program.
I still have no idea what you think is an alternative that would have made a North Korea with South Korea's economy a great thing for arms control.
Keeping North Korea poor has all been waste of time unless our goal was to have 75 years of "wasted time" before a potentially uncontrollable escalation with China.
The thing is, sanctions damage both the sanctioned nation and the sanctioner.
I'm not really optimistic about western Europe's willingness to absorb damage in it economy in order to damage Russia. France's government expenditures are 55% of GDP, much of it financed by borrowing. That's the level maintained by major powers in the world wars. Can the French state demand more from a private sector that's funding the equivalent of a total war?
Worse yet, western European politics gives you the strong impression all these expenditures are necessary to prevent the election of a pro-Russian government or a bloody revolution.
Hence why sanctions seem to be something of a joke.
Military operations would do that as well. Ukraine is destroying Russia's oil and gas industry right now. Sanctions or not, that oil and gas is becoming unavailable. Either way, preventing innocent Ukrainians being slaughtered with your money will do harm to your economy; continuing to get cheap oil from Russia inevitably pays for evil.
Might as well do whatever is most effective, which is likely to be harsh sanctions followed by military action to fully enforce them.
> and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce
The “global community” you’re referring to consists of America and its client states—only around 1/8th of the world’s population.
Yeah, it seems hard to say military intervention is preferable to increased accounting and recordkeeping requirements. Or maybe sheltered is a better way to put. Which is a good thing! For most people alive on Earth right now haven't had to deal with wars of territorial expansion. Yes wars exist, and yes territorial expansion by military might conitnues, and military occupations from the US certainly don't help. But overall we're in a point of relative stability.
The same Dan Dexter that pushed for the Iraq war? Should we treat his opinions as such?
I was thinking the same thing. The entire war in Iraq seems to contradict any putatively held ideals around the idea of not redrawing borders.
While an incompetent failure and eventually downright vile, it was hardly an annexation.
There is no 80-year norm against redrawing borders. 80 years ago, Crimea was a part of the Russian SSR - now it's part of a free and independent Ukraine.
Eastern Europe looks a heck of a lot different, as did British India.
In all fairness, 80 years ago, the world was on the cusp of a massive border redraw, but the Phillipine Islands were still a US territory.
>> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders
What are the current borders of Yugoslavia?
Did anybody in the west argue that redrawing the borders of Yugoslavia was against global norms?
Did you?
Or British India for that matter.
The federal entity Yugoslavia ceased to exists, but the borders are actually the same as they were in socialist Yugoslavia.
> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce
The previous Russian imperial project, the Soviet Union, ended 35 years ago, not 80. It's easy to overlook that they forcibly redrew borders and kept them redrawn for decades (and still to this day do keep some territories they conquered in imperialist wars when they were still allied with Nazi Germany).
It's not like ww2 where you have increasingly fewer people who were old enough to consciously experience it. It's very likely that most people on this forum were around for the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian imperialism.
> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce.
Cool story bro. Almost like Kosovo never happened.
[flagged]
That’s neither here nor there, is it?
You cannot take someone seriously when they hold conflicting thoughts. Doublethink and doublespeak are signs of disingenuous sociopathy.
I don't know what the situation is now. but one of the more surreal aspects of the war was how the gas pipelines through Ukraine were kept open. Ukraine desperately needed the transit fees. and Russia desperately needed to sell it's gas. So here they were, in the middle of a war, still doing business with each other.
They also could not anger donor EU countries sucking on the far end of the pipe. So time was provided for them to switch to LNG from the US and Qatar.
The reason for that is simple - Russia started its invasion _after_ making Europe dependent on its gas. In Ukraine a lot of people predicted that the war is inevitable after the latest north stream is finished.
The reduction of purchase of gas from Russia did significantly impacted energy prices across EU to the point of populist far-right pro-russia governments rising in popularity (even though that is not the only reason).
So Russia and China has a long term strategy of subverting the west and we are just reacting when there are no good options available.
But, sanctions do work. The problem is that the economic power of the west is comparable these days to "global north".
Russia did not make Europe dependent on them for gas. Europe freely made that choice, even going so far as to do away with existing alternatives like nuclear in Germany. Trump even warned them. They had a wonderful time laughing at him while proclaiming the ignorant orange buffoon didn't understand Europe. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Everyone then pretended Europe didn't make itself vulnerable while also ridiculing anyone who dared sound an alarm about the potential danger.
Europe wasn't forced. Europe chose and chose freely. Europe chose poorly.
Yes, but if you remember, the consensus was that countries with economic ties don't go to wars. There were no illusions about Russia, but the idea was to tame it by making it prosper through trade with "rich EU".
A lot of people were calling this strategy stupid, but that was the consensus for multiple decades.
You can also tell that the strategy with China failed in exactly the same way.
So I think the world will be a very different place in the next millennia.
If you're referring to the Nordstream pipeline, then Biden approved to have it blown as a calendestine operation. The EU parliament has admitted this.
Europe did choose poorly, but it's not like the U.S. is an amicable partner. They want to sell their gas at their preferred prices as well.
The EU parliament has "admitted" no such thing. But it would be great if the US provided some clandestine support for destroying Russian infrastructure. Burn it all.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
The only other options are psychological or kinetic.
Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions, that wouldn't encourage as much routing around. Tax Russian oil/gas at the max point in the Laffer (-esque) curve, with all the revenue flowing as direct aid to Ukraine.
(I know 'tariff' has become a dirty word these days to due the obvious abuse, but I swear I'm making this comment in good faith)
Europe kept buying Russian oil and gas, because other sources could not come online quickly enough. Tariffs would have only made energy even more expensive than it already was. Now it's mostly Hungary and Slovakia buying Russian energy, as well as some LNG imports. Those two countries are not too keen on sanctioning Russia, especially in ways that would hurt their economy. Any attempts to impose tariffs on energy imports from Russia would have led to a major internal crisis in the EU.
The US already started to pressure these two. We'll see how it goes. Ukraine could always blow up or sabotage the pipelines or some of the pumping stations if they think it's appropriate, either in Russia or on their own territory.
It’s frankly a pretty bold bet to count on these pipelines existing for years to come. It might have been smarter for Hungary and Slovakia to scramble for other sources of energy, starting March 2022.
> Europe kept buying Russian oil and gas, because other sources could not come online quickly enough
They did do sanctions, so I don't know what you're trying to argue.
> Tariffs would have only made energy even more expensive than it already was.
Not as expensive as outright sanctions, of course.
As I said - sanctions are discrete (yes or no), whereas tariffs are a continuous knob.
There were essentially no sanctions impacting Russian energy exports to Europe. Those would have hurt Europe much more than Russia. If you can't export something, the damage is proportional to the volume of the exports. But if you don't have enough energy, your entire economy suffers.
The increases in energy prices mostly came from voluntary attempts to find alternatives to Russian energy and from Russia constraining the supply.
Why would Russia voluntarily give up money by constraining the supply during the war? That makes absolutely no sense.
Coersion. A comparatively small amount of revenue being given up could scare Europe away from supplying Ukraine with materiel. The Russians put out ads about how Europe would be freezing through winter.
Because suddenly the oil isn't Russian anymore but Indian or something like that. Here's[1] an article going into how after the 2014 sanctions suddenly a lot of tropical fruits started growing in Belarussia, or how the landlocked country suddenly started exporting tons of Belarusian shrimp.
[1]: https://east-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Belarus-E...
> Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions
There are still some qualitative differences: With sanctions, you'll know something dodgy has occurred when you find a pallet of My Little Putin dolls traveling through the port, you don't need to call up a bunch of lawyers and accountants.
That said, I readily admit that oil is a lot more disguise-able and fungible.
Or encourage buying from alternative hydrocarbon suppliers, like Canada, Australia and the U.S.
De-sanction Iran and Venezuela too, before sanctioning Russian oil.
Russia is the third largest oil producing country, this plan was never going to work because oil is a fungible resource. Sure you can stop buying from Russia and buy from someone else, but that just kicks off a game of musical chairs where everyone is backfilling from someone else and eventually _someone_ is buying from Russia to make everything whole. If Russia was some insignificant player the world could have frozen them out entirely but they simply produce too much oil for the world to absorb the loss of all of it.
Everyone is aware that Russian crude oil will still enter the market through various channels regardless of sanctions. The point of sanctions is just to slightly reduce Russian government revenue. In combination with other measures this provides some leverage in negotiations over a peace settlement.
> The point of sanctions is just to slightly reduce Russian government revenue. In combination with other measures this provides some leverage in negotiations over a peace settlement.
How's that working out? Apparently someone miscalculated.
Great. Russian revenue from gas and oil fell considerably since the start of the war.
How many years does it typically take for crippling sanctions to bring a country crawling to the bargaining table?
Be careful of the goal. Sanctions are unlikely to directly bring someone to the bargaining table. Sanctions make is harder to get the things Russia needs to fight way. It will take years to catch up, but Russia has a smaller economy. Russia has mostly stopped using tanks because they can only make a few of them (1-3 per day depending on what source you ask), and they have no ability to make more, sanctions are part of this.
The real question is what if there were none - Russia would have more money and thus have done a lot more damage to Ukraine - but there is no way to measure damage they could have done.
> The point of sanctions is just to slightly reduce Russian government revenue. In combination with other measures this provides some leverage in negotiations over a peace settlement.
The words you apparently missed from what GP wrote are: "slightly reduce" and "some leverage". Nobody said that sanctions end wars or bring about peace negotiations on their own.
The idea is to incessantly put pressure on their economy until it breaks or adapts. At which point you put more pressure until they become the DPRK or Iran.
Right, that would be a good outcome. North Korea and Iran are annoyances but not existential threats and they have minimal capability to project power far outside their borders. The goal should be to cripple and impoverish Russia through a sustained policy of maximum cruelty that includes everything short of kinetic attacks.
>Military action is appearing more preferable to that.
Great call. Feel free to head to the front lines and put your life on the line. Or should only other people do that?
This is how we will lose this war. 'Everyone knows it is fake', probably the authorities too. But dealing with it in modern bureaucracy will take years, by which time another fake insurer is up and running.
A big part of the problem here is that ships and trips that don't by the numbers benefit from buying insurance are being forced to so there's a whole ecosystem of various shades of sketchy insurance insuring all sorts of mundane things and so sketchy insurance is a poor heuristic for "they might be up to no good, it's worth looking into them".
There's an artificially oversized haystack the needles are hiding in.
[flagged]
It’s important to follow due process. We need more checks and balances, not fewer. Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly.
We need to follow the process. And the process should be extensive. This is a problem of not enough process. Ideally, we could have more.
> Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly.
Does Norway even have juries? At least in Sweden we don't have any juries in court (and the two countries tend to be more similar than not), so while the overall comment sounds fitting (and I agree), some details seem to miss the detail of what country this is about :)
Both Norway and Sweden have Lay Judges in the lower courts (which is little more than voluntary juries):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_judge
Nämndemän (Lay Judges) are nothing like juries, at least how I understand juries. In lower courts (tingsrätt), those people are appointed by the city council, and the people chosen are often politically involved (yet the appointment is "unpolitical"), they're not just "randoms" who got called to be in the jury, like how I understand the juries in the US to work.
The randomness of selection is the only difference of any significance. Lay judges and juries have the same amount of judicial power and knowledge.
Edit: it has been pointed out to me that lay judges have even more powers such as interpretation of law than juries, which seems dangerous.
Haha, I was explaining how it should be. Not how it is.
Due process needs to be a lot faster and it could be. Things which warrant immediate action are delayed by months, years, or decades by wildly inefficient and slow processes that have nothing to do with someone's right to fair judgement.
We shouldn’t rush to judgment. A few years sounds like a good period of time for things that could affect someone’s life. One could argue it should take a century or more to convict people of such crimes. How can we be sure it’s not politically motivated? Only way is to ensure that we wait for political change and see if the crime is still to be prosecuted.
The longer it takes, the less of a deterrent it is. What would even be the point of convicting someone a century later?
"Justice delayed is justice denied".
[dead]
It’s crazy how modern and complex company structures became impossible to govern.
There are so many cases in which criminals just open a ton of new companies, to overload the authorities. Until the authorities shut something down, they moved on three times already.
That's why you usually need a permit to sell insurance.
Which Ro Marine didn't have- but they submitted forged documents to Panama and other countries claiming they did. When you have the resources of a nation-state, forging documents from other countries is straight-forward: you can all buy roughly the same stamps, etc. from the same sources, for your own documents. So changing a stamp or two to look like Norway's stamps isn't too difficult.
Getting ports around the world to check back with the originating agency on every document they look at... would be a lot of extra work.
Is sending a plausible looking letter really all that's required? Does nobody ever call back to the Insurance Association of Norway (whatever they may be called) and check references? I mean, we check job seeker's references regularly.
We have the tech to solve most of this (digital signatures, digitally signed public DBs -aka Blockchain) but the state bureaucracy apparatus can't figure that out for various reasons.
Actually a transparency log is a better system for a digitally signed public DB than a Blockchain, but yes the technology exists.
Only because punishment isn't harsh and quick enough for the initial offenders. The state fell short on that, and hence created an arbitrage opportunity.
With all the broadband communications and high definition video and audio, it should have been trivial to prove the fraud and disincentivize committing it by sufficiently punishing it.
Punishment often doesn't matter. Until someone notices, it's finished already for a long time. People are disposable, and some just take the risk to go to prison for a lot of money. It's often possible to disappear into another country, before the authorities start to figure out what's happening.
>The state fell short on that, and hence created an arbitrage opportunity
The state fell short on that because everyone hates violence so there isn't the political will to deploy it at the drop of a hat multiplied by everyone's pet issues.
The state "technically could" do a lot of stuff but it doesn't because doing even a small subset of those things more than it does would destabilize it.
I'm doubly baffled by this story.
First, when I buy mandatory car insurance, police can check its validity in seconds. I'd expect international shipping to be at least at that level of strictness.
Second, how insurance can help avoid sanctions? The enforcement should look at the goods source and destination, not on who insured them, right?
The URL and HTML title element have the current HN title, "Over 100 ships have sailed with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine." But FWIW, the Open Graph title meta element is "NRK reveals: Russian used Norwegian company to fool the West."
NRK is very aggressive on a/b testing headlines - presumably optimizing for click through rates.
Almost invariably if I read a story in the morning - the title will be different after noon.
I like the Tom Clancy vibes of this. There’s a Sum of All Fears in there somewhere.
On a more serious note this reminds me of the crime occurring in Canada. They have a car theft pipeline in place with paperwork at the MOT level. The cars end up being shipped to Africa in less time than you might think - this is one outcome, but there are others. Nobody really “cares” enough even though one of the mayors stated everyone they know in their neighborhood has had their car stolen.
The war was already lost, at home and abroad.
Canada also recommended to leave residential doors unlocked with the car keys in plain sight to reduce the chances of property damage and personal harm when the thieves come for your car, so Canada can get stuffed.
I thought this was made up nonsense, but for those who are thinking the same thing as me, a Toronto police officer really recommended doing exactly this [0].
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/10359055/leave-car-keys-the-front...
I love how "a Toronto police officer suggests" becomes "Canada recommends".
Recently a man was shot and killed in a home invasion defending his family (also in Ontario). The police first claimed it was a targeted killing (implying the man was a gang member), then when that turned out false, the police said you should comply with home invaders instead of resisting...
https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/warmington-top-cop-wa...
So.. I live in Ontario. And I actually agree with that statement. Why would you resist and risk your life instead of just complying? Material things aren't worth actually getting hurt over.
The implication that "the police say this because they can't stop the crime" is IMO not the right take-away. The correct take-away is that a certain level of crime is unavoidable in practice, and you should prioritize your life over your property.
The problem with this line of thinking is that home invasion is a different kind of crime from breaking and entering.
With breaking and entering, the goal is to get what they can with a minimum of fuss. Locked doors, barking dogs, automatic lights, security systems, etc are all great deterrents, because the goal is to get as much as possible while avoiding capture. The table stakes are that the burglar can get in and out without getting caught.
With home invasion, the whole threat profile is different. The operating premise is that the invader will use violence or the threat of it to brutalize the home occupants into facilitating the theft, the escape, and avoidance of prosecution.
Think of how wild animals engage in violence: they will not enter into a violent situation unless trapped (either physically, or by circumstance - e.g. fight or starve), or they think they can win the fight without sustaining any substantial injury. In the case of a home invasion, you are trapped, but the other guy has chosen the fight.
All of that to say, compliance should be done in the light of keeping yourself and those around you together and unharmed, and not willy-nilly. Obviously, don't pick a fight over a TV. But understand that if they continue their breaking-and-entering after they know you're there, compliance may be insufficient to protect your life.
Agreed with you actually. This might be me not being a native English speaker, and 'home invasion' and 'breaking and entering' where the same thing in my mind. But with the differences between the two that you've highlighted here, I do agree that different situations require different approaches.
Breaking-and-entering is an Irish term from their British occupation. When a British landlord evicted his tenants, he would board up the door.
The term comes from tenants breaking the boarded up door and entering their own home.
The entire point is that in a home invasion, you have no guarantee the criminal is only interested in your property. If someone deliberately busts into an occupied house, there is a nonzero chance they are also interested in killing or assaulting (sexually or otherwise) the occupants.
Armed intruders can demand something one minute and something else the next. They may be mentally deranged, they may be sexually devious, there's a good chance they don't have a lot of moral limitations. The issue is not material things. That there's an optimal approach to dealing with them, when you're unarmed, is just not true. You must do what seems best given the situation.
“Rules based order.”
Next they’ll be charging the victims for not following these rules.
It's good advice. Losing a car is much less worse than personal injury or worse. Everybody's a toughguy until a methhead who can't feel pain stabs you 15 times. Should the police crack down? Sure, but they aren't magicians, crime isn't gonna magically dissolve tomorrow. In the mean time, keep yourself safe by not inviting harm.
This attitude is exactly the problem. It only takes a small fraction of people to fight the meth head for the meth head to choose a different crime.
It's like the "we don't pay ransoms" logic only the math is infinitely more favorable to victims.
I'm living in a third-world country and I think this is madness. It's unimaginable here, to be afraid of "methheads" so much and giving up on your own property. I never saw "methhead" in my life, but I sure would do my best to protect my valuable property. May be I need to work more to buy a car, compared to average Canadian, I don't know.
Yeah Canadian government is crazy. They made drugs legal, and they also let criminals go after they get caught.
When you defend yourself you don't just defend yourself, but every other victim that would come after you.
To some extend, a criminal with nothing to lose don't necessarily stop just because they get caught.
And for most of us, any risk to health or wellbeing isn't worth taking. You have something to lose the desperate criminal drug addict might not.
Granted, hardening your property against burglary is pretty low risk. There is no reason not to have 3 point doors and windows.
Just don't harden it so much that a determined firefighter can't get in :)
Yeah and you can probably get insurance against theft right?
It becomes unaffordable pretty quickly for a lot of people when such theft becomes endemic.
Yep, just ask Kia owners as a recent example.
If the culture was "if a methhead tries to stab you, you can and should use any force necessary to stop them" that might be different
But no, the culture in Canada is "Check your privilege and let the poor methhead stab you"
No joke, people in Canada genuinely do not think they can or should use force to protect themselves from dangerous threats
With all due respect you are quite incorrect.
Most people think and do use for to protect themselves from threats like all humans.
The issue was bringing the US style castle doctrine defence argument where some folks feel that since the intruder is trespassing they have carte blanche to murder them.
Are you able to unpack that more? Are people not proud of themselves and their culture? Do they not want to prioritize the safety of themselves and their possessions?
[flagged]
I hope you haven't extended that thinking-exercise to murders and more.
The Broken Window Fallacy strikes again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
TL;DR - If you spend money to fix a broken window, you don't spend that money to replace your shoes.
Thanks, I hadn't heard of that parable before
[flagged]
This is a classic example of Poe's Law. If it's satire, it's brilliant. If it's serious, well ...
I don't know, as European resident it's serious and working solution.
Maybe people would if transit stations weren't de-facto homeless shelters and if it were safer to do so...
Yah I wouldn't recommend public transport in Toronto to anyone lol.
Yeah one time there was maintenance in the subway and they ran substitute buses, and it was also a super rainy day, and I got into the bus, sat down, looked to my right and there was a guy sleeping on the back seat, but you couldn't see him unless you were actually up close, so people kept coming up trying to sit, but then they saw (and smelled) the guy sleeping there and made funny faces lol.
When the government can't succeed in making public transit appealing, I guess they fall back on letting thieves steal everybody's cars so people have no other choice, Lmao.
[flagged]
For some context, I strongly encourage you to read "90% of everything" by Rose George. It is a brilliant expose of the shipping industry, and it's a really bad industry. Flags of convenience, forcing people to work on ships, not paying them, not even really caring if they fall overboard. The international shipping industry is damn near a hate crime.
The "hate crime" thing is really imprecise use of language.
[flagged]
[flagged]
The second sentence of the article answers the fake insurance bit; "did not have permission to sell insurance but did it anyway".
If you click the (helpfully underlined) first use of "shadow fleet" in the article it defines it for you. (Or ask Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_fleet)
I feel like TFA answers the fake insurance question pretty well. The company sold "insurance" which was not actually insurance. They were providing a cover for ships selling from a sanctioned country. Those ships were required to have insurance, and no legitimate business would insure them.
Sanctioned by what international legal body?
> What is “fake insurance?”
Do you believe Ro Marine would have paid out claims related to their "insured" vessels?
You can literally press on it in the article and a definition pops up.
I didn’t see any article. I saw a propaganda piece.
Anything not validated by NATO/ USA is fake, rest of the world should adhere to their terms and definitions as the high seas are owned by them
Definitely no. The "fake" here is about certainty that no insurance payout would occur in case of issue, meaning for example an oil tanker accidently dumping tons of black goo onto some english seaside resort, no compensation would come out of anywhere.
How reliable is liability insurance for that sort of thing, generally speaking?
Quite. The real insurers are large, old, and have long made a name for themselves in this regard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_of_London
So existing legacy monopolies are real and all newcomers are fake. Got it.
Nah. The smaller new ones reinsure via folks like Lloyds. It’s quite complex.
The company in this article could have done that, but they forged documents to avoid it. They had no intention of covering accidents - it was just plain fake to get these ships into ports.
They were not truly insured.
"All ships must have insurance". Says fucking who?
Port operators