Russia Is Getting Around Sanctions to Secure Supply of Key Chips for War | Hacker News Reader

Russia Is Getting Around Sanctions to Secure Supply of Key Chips for War

bloomberg.com

41 pointsamadeuspagel24 comments

I don’t know if you guys saw the propaganda video of Russia repairing the bridge, but what ticked me off was the asphalt rollers were brand new, and are made by a subsidiary of John Deere.

Links?

First place I saw it mentioned was through AvE on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsE0G8YQYrc

No source cited for the video.

https://archive.ph/bPIrz

And there's no enforcement mechanism embedded, because ...? Is there really no adversarial thinking in these things? "What could they do to circumvent this?" - "Import it by proxy" - "okay, we should make sure that's banned"

Instead, it's "wow, who could've known?!"

Why would you think there isn't? https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1241

This article is about European goods being exported to Russia via proxies, Europe isn't part of the US.

And the article explains how the EU does the same thing.

Except they don't, which is the problem. They're leaving it to the member states, which vary greatly in enforcement, and so you can get around enforcement in one state by exporting to another state first (which is easy thanks to the low-friction shared market) before exporting to your target proxy country.

There's a reason why trade with the Russian proxies has increased by pretty much the amount that direct trade with Russia has decreased: because the enforcement of the sanctions doesn't work correctly and Europe hasn't found a single voice on it, and additionally doesn't want to bring down the hammer on anyone in order to not offend them.

Enforcement failure doesn't mean it isn't banned as you claimed earlier.

That's not what I claimed. I asked why they hadn't included enforcement provisions because it's obvious that people will try to get around it and it's even obvious how they will get around it.

Yet here we are, and I still don't know. You offered that the US does some enforcement. So why doesn't the EU? Surely we have the bureaucratic manpower.

> "What could they do to circumvent this?" - "Import it by proxy" - "okay, we should make sure that's banned"

> Instead, it's "wow, who could've known?!"

I don't know how to read this any other way. Enforcing sanctions properly is something the EU has struggled with (https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/strict-and-uniform... gives an example of DPRK collecting hostel revenue in Berlin for years with no penalties ever administered), but that is different from saying that "import by proxy" is was unknown and not banned.

Maybe because they know and just want to create an illusion of actions

Some mixture of hubris, willful blindness, and ignorance.

That's all very well, but what are they going to do with the rest of the washing machines after they have taken the chips out?

I love how we here in the US just assume we have the right to tell Turkey and UAE who they can do business with. As if they don't have their own interests.

Okay, hope their interests aren’t in doing business in the US if they want to circumvent US sanctions.

We absolutely have the right to draw moral lines in the sand: if you do business with brutal dictatorships, you are the enemy too.

Yeah, but no one likes to get moral lectures from hypocrites. We Americans sure do like self-determination, just not for anyone else.

Is it lost on you that this specific action is literally in defence of self determination in the context of the entire point of the war. Such an incredibly lazy take.

Dictatorships aren’t self determination.

> if you do business with brutal dictatorships, you are the enemy too.

Why is the US doing business with Saudi Arabia? Let's see how your moral lines bend around the agenda.

Sanction and export controls are used by governments around the world as a means to further their foreign policy and national security interests, not just the US. Further these regulations always govern both the export and re-export of the goods and services being sold. They are useless otherwise.

This is playing out right now in the EU with Switzerland and Germany debating allowing armaments to be re-exported to Ukraine.[1]

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/switzerland-rethinks-neutral...

Turkey is a nato member - military alliance that russia is at war with (by their own admission) so it is sad that we even need to tell them anything

When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

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