How Russia dodges oil sanctions on an industrial scale | Hacker News Reader

How Russia dodges oil sanctions on an industrial scale

economist.com

35 pointsWithinReason14 comments

Did people seriously expect that this oil would not be getting out?

Marc Rich used to smuggle Iranian embargo oil into Israel, and the guy who replaced him in Glencore (Glassenberg) was promoted because he was the guy who figured out how to trade with apartheid SA.

When the rewards are big enough somebody will take the risk and figure out how to it. The only difference now is that these trades are way too toxic for Western commodity traders and so eastern outfits will do it instead.

I would have thought that the point of these exercises was to drive costs up, not make things utterly impossible.

The world, sadly, still needs all that oil from everywhere, to keep the economy / ship of fools from running aground.

An ideal outcome is Russia sells the oil at a steep discount, has less free cash to buy chips to put in munitions, and the rest of the world has enough oil to keep the general population from rioting in the streets because eggs are too expensive.

Ofcourse not. Russia is becoming a pariah state like North Korea and Iran: earn enough money to prop up the regime and fund the war but no more state pensions for the elderly or medicine for the sick.

The sanctions isolate Russia and make it diplomatically and economically irrelevant. The Kremlin won't have money for soft power projection. Their regional power is already diminishing.

Sanctions promised to plunge the economy by up to 50% of their GDP, but instead russian GDP only decreased by approximately 2% - 3% in 2022, so almost nothing. EU and US lost any credibility by promising the harshest sanctions ever, but not achieving anything at all. Yeah, and do I need to say that russian ruble is even stronger than it was before sanctions?

Where did you get these numbers? Not trying to deny the claims, just curious where they're coming from.

Maybe it was here

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/impact-sanct...

What volume of trade is that high "official" ruble value based on? The retail/p2p volume outside of state-run banks seems to be higher now, and at a significantly lower ruble value.

& welcome to hn, first commenter!

Years ago, I had been studying organized crime in Nigeria. One of the things that astonished me at the time was the amount of trafficking in stolen crude oil. "Bunkering" it is called. Gangs would tap into pipelines that were transporting crude from oil fields to ports. They'd put it in barrels and haul trucks full of barrels to their own docks where they'd fill smaller tankers. Their markets were typically the same places that would purchase smuggled Iranian oil. Sometimes, satellite imagery would show the small tankers alongside larger tankers. The belief was that the bunkered oil would then get mixed in with "legit" oil.

I think the USA is having a hard time accepting how little impact they have in 2023. Russia is doing just fine with sanctions because the world is dependent on gas and oil. Maybe once EV catches on fully.

Also in denial over how much of the world is actually going along with the sanctions. (http://country.eiu.com/asset_images/1632029946.gif)

The majority of those gray countries combined make up less than 1% of Russia's trade (excluding former Soviet states/China).

It still creates a lot of friction.

Delays, etc.

Right, I wonder how much is this like using DRM- it's not completely stopping piracy but it's making it less easy to pirate, thus disincentivizing at least some people from doing it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230130015330/https://www.econo...

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