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
mandevil · 1h ago
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.
username332211 · 45m ago
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.
SpicyUme · 1h ago
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.
notmyjob · 37m ago
The same Dan Dexter that pushed for the Iraq war? Should we treat his opinions as such?
onpointed · 1h ago
Or encourage buying from alternative hydrocarbon suppliers, like Canada, Australia and the U.S.
xienze · 1h ago
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.
nradov · 36m ago
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.
xienze · 34m ago
> 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.
Kbelicius · 17m ago
Great. Russian revenue from gas and oil fell considerably since the start of the war.
xienze · 9m ago
How many years does it typically take for crippling sanctions to bring a country crawling to the bargaining table?
beauzero · 2h ago
The only other options are psychological or kinetic.
mindslight · 2h ago
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)
jltsiren · 1h ago
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.
mindslight · 1h ago
> 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.
jltsiren · 16m ago
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.
Terr_ · 9m ago
> 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.
jimnotgym · 4h ago
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.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
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.
renewiltord · 3h ago
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.
diggan · 3h ago
> 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 :)
Y-bar · 2h ago
Both Norway and Sweden have Lay Judges in the lower courts (which is little more than voluntary juries):
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.
Y-bar · 1h ago
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.
renewiltord · 3h ago
Haha, I was explaining how it should be. Not how it is.
colechristensen · 3h ago
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.
renewiltord · 3h ago
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.
recursive · 1h ago
The longer it takes, the less of a deterrent it is. What would even be the point of convicting someone a century later?
AdrianB1 · 2h ago
"Justice delayed is justice denied".
andix · 3h ago
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.
NoahZuniga · 2h ago
That's why you usually need a permit to sell insurance.
mandevil · 43m ago
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.
csomar · 38m ago
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.
NoahZuniga · 19m ago
Actually a transparency log is a better system for a digitally signed public DB than a Blockchain, but yes the technology exists.
lotsofpulp · 2h ago
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.
andix · 55m ago
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.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
>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.
loeg · 2h ago
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."
e12e · 2h ago
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.
hn_throw_250910 · 4h ago
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.
stronglikedan · 3h ago
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.
GenerWork · 2h ago
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].
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.
potato3732842 · 2h ago
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.
vbezhenar · 2h ago
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.
koakuma-chan · 2h ago
Yeah Canadian government is crazy. They made drugs legal, and they also let criminals go after they get caught.
mothballed · 1h ago
When you defend yourself you don't just defend yourself, but every other victim that would come after you.
koakuma-chan · 2h ago
Yeah and you can probably get insurance against theft right?
zdragnar · 2h ago
It becomes unaffordable pretty quickly for a lot of people when such theft becomes endemic.
to11mtm · 1h ago
Yep, just ask Kia owners as a recent example.
bluefirebrand · 2h ago
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
dismalaf · 2h ago
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.
petsfed · 1h ago
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.
Insanity · 1h ago
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.
psunavy03 · 2h ago
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.
yostrovs · 2h ago
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.
Taek · 3h ago
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?
Simulacra · 3h ago
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.
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
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.
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.
How's that working out? Apparently someone miscalculated.
(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)
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.
The increases in energy prices mostly came from voluntary attempts to find alternatives to Russian energy and from Russia constraining the supply.
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.
There's an artificially oversized haystack the needles are hiding in.
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.
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 :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_judge
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Almost invariably if I read a story in the morning - the title will be different after noon.
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.
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/10359055/leave-car-keys-the-front...
It's like the "we don't pay ransoms" logic only the math is infinitely more favorable to victims.
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
https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/warmington-top-cop-wa...
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.
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.