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Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

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Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#81

Post by nradov »

xienze wrote: post #71
onpointed wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or encourage buying from alternative hydrocarbon suppliers, like Canada, Australia and the U.S.

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 froz…

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.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#82

Post by xienze »

nradov wrote: post #81
xienze wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 froz…

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.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#83

Post by spiderice »

Ozarkian wrote: post #53
p0wn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#84

Post by [deleted] »

xienze wrote: post #82
nradov wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#85

Post by NoahZuniga »

csomar wrote: post #79
mandevil wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worl…

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.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#86

Post by Kbelicius »

xienze wrote: post #82
nradov wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#87

Post by jltsiren »

mindslight wrote: post #72
jltsiren wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imp…

> 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.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#88

Post by Terr_ »

mindslight wrote: post #57
beauzero wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> 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.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#89

Post by xienze »

Kbelicius wrote: post #86
xienze wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#90

Post by petertodd »

username332211 wrote: post #75
mandevil wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 equ…

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.

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