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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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].
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
1 reply →
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?
2 replies →
> 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.
>> 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?
1 reply →
> 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.
I wonder how Palestinians feel about the jewish man Drezner arguing against territorial expansion.
1 reply →
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.
3 replies →
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)
8 replies →
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.
9 replies →
>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 :)
4 replies →
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.
3 replies →
[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.
3 replies →
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.
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...
18 replies →
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?
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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
1 reply →
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This is a classic example of Poe's Law. If it's satire, it's brilliant. If it's serious, well ...
1 reply →
Maybe people would if transit stations weren't de-facto homeless shelters and if it were safer to do so...
2 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
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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.
3 replies →
They were not truly insured.
"All ships must have insurance". Says fucking who?
Port operators