{"id":284250,"date":"2025-01-06T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T12:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=284250"},"modified":"2025-01-04T10:22:30","modified_gmt":"2025-01-04T10:22:30","slug":"under-cover-of-sanction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/under-cover-of-sanction\/","title":{"rendered":"Under Cover of Sanction"},"content":{"rendered":"

3 Jan 2025 <\/em>– The degree of restraint and investigative rigor employed by Washington, NATO, and their media allies when ascribing guilt to Russia for any indiscretion bears little relation to how NATO\u2019s actions are assessed. This has long been standard operating procedure, but the events in the Baltic Sea over the past two years take this pattern further.<\/p>\n

Acts of aggression where the US or its allies motives are clearest must be most obfuscated, with logical conclusions displaced in headlines by nefarious sounding, circumstantial evidence that points elsewhere. The framing for the public of any reporting regarding Russia\u2019s war with Ukraine must always note that the war was \u2018unprovoked\u2019 and a \u2018full scale invasion\u2019, their actions \u2018brutal\u2019, their forces a \u2018war machine\u2019, our Ukrainian brethren pure.<\/p>\n

This ritual is bolstered by the ever growing count of sanctions imposed on Russia, which have spawned convoluted business arrangements that simplify the task of making various Russian entities look like they have something to hide. Creating this lens of distortion is a critical endeavor, for if the western public only believed their eyes, they might see the degree to which their government\u2019s own actions look far more suspect.<\/p>\n

The Webs that Sanctions Spawn<\/h2>\n

The quantity of sanctions imposed by the US government has increased every year for more than two decades<\/a>. Joe Biden has long since set the high mark for sanctions introduced during any presidential term, including presidents in office for more than a single term<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The US treasury department alone maintains 38 different sanctions programs<\/a>. Among them are sanctions targeting nations, non-nation organizations, and individuals, encompassing different combinations of trade, financial transactions, and economic assistance programs. Given the challenge for businesses to remain cognizant of and compliant with these sanctions, the market for software that flags compliance vulnerabilities in companies\u2019 supply chains has grown<\/a> to a value of several billion dollars.<\/p>\n

Sanctions lead to business arrangements which would otherwise appear entirely arbitrary and inefficient, if not for the steps the parties involved must take to maintain compliance with the sanctions through loopholes and workarounds.<\/p>\n

As one example<\/a>, consider a recent case of a fish hatchery in Norway. Initially owned by a Russian firm, to maintain compliance with the hundreds of sanctions targeting Russia in response to Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, the fishery resolved to transfer ownership to one of the hatchery\u2019s managers, a Norwegian citizen.<\/p>\n

The prospective owner did not have the funds to buy it outright, but lending institutions would not participate in business transactions involving Russian entities amid the sanctions. Nor could the transfer be facilitated via financing from the original owner, as sanctions prevented the new owner from making loan repayments in rubles. The parties thus agreed on a financed sale of just under $1 million<\/a>, not in currency, but to be repaid in actual fish hatchlings produced by the hatchery. Regulatory bodies in Norway\u2014 a country highly reliant<\/a> on the seafood industry as an economic bedrock\u2014voiced no issues with the agreement.<\/p>\n

Despite this, the fishery\u2019s operations were ultimately halted when they lost their insurance coverage. The insurer revoked their coverages, concerned about accepting the premium from a firm still associated with a Russian entity. The hatchery filed a suit against the insurer, and appeals are ongoing.<\/p>\n

The trial proceedings thus far have illustrated that these sanctions produce results with little relation to the goals the sanctions ostensibly seek to achieve. In one courtroom exchange, the attorney for the insurer questioned the prospective buyer about whether the fish delivered to the seller as loan payment would \u201ccontribute to the Russian economy going round.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prospective owner answered the question with a question, because in any scenario he was going to be contributing to the Russian economy in several ways which would not run afoul of the sanctions:<\/p>\n

\u201cI have no qualification to know anything about that. Norwegian fish feed factories still buy raw materials from Russia for fish feed, soy, and other things grown in Russia. I cannot understand (sic) that it is okay, while it should not be okay to sell food to Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s \u2018Ghost Ships\u2019<\/h2>\n

The convoluted systems which the sanctions regimes lead to are useful to NATO\u2019s interests in the realm of public relations. When they need to make Russia look suspicious for something, these complicated arrangements can be pointed to as suspicious and reported as such by the Western mainstream media. They likewise provide cover and deniability for NATO\u2019s own actions, an important tool considering the degree to which they are invested in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, a war in which NATO still claims to not be a direct participant.<\/p>\n

Such a lens is useful in consideration of the recurring headlines alleging Russian involvement in the destruction of major infrastructure in the Baltic Sea in recent years, most recently regarding damage to undersea power cables, but originating with the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, an act of sabotage that destroyed billions of dollars\u2019 worth of energy infrastructure and one of the worst environmental disasters in recent history.<\/p>\n

The Eagle S<\/em><\/h3>\n

December 26th<\/sup> 2024, the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> that authorities in Finland had seized an oil tanker, the Eagle S,<\/em> suspected of severing undersea cables by dragging its anchor.<\/p>\n

The ship had been chartered by a Russian oil company to transport its oil. A December 27th<\/sup> follow up article in the New York Times<\/em>, presented new analysis<\/a> about the grave intentions of the ship, albeit without any new evidence. Citing an analyst from maritime journal Lloyd\u2019s List<\/em>: \u201cIt\u2019s a sanctions evader, it\u2019s really dangerous, it\u2019s just a piece of rust bucket floating junk of steel.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day that the NYT ran this article, the same Lloyd\u2019s List analyst also posted an article on the Lloyd\u2019s site<\/a> entitled Russia-linked cable-cutting tanker seized by Finland \u2018was loaded with spying equipment\u2019. <\/em><\/p>\n

In that article, another anonymous source tells us the ship, characterized as part of the \u201cRussia Linked dark fleet,\u201d was outfitted with equipment to become a \u201cspy ship\u201d and had \u201chuge portable suitcases\u201d with \u201cmany laptops\u201d that had keyboards suited for the Turkish and Russian language.<\/p>\n

This \u2018dark fleet\u2019 designation, a footnote explains is earned if the \u201cship is aged 15 years or over, anonymously owned and\/or has a corporate structure designed to obfuscate beneficial ownership discovery, solely deployed in sanctioned oil trades, and engaged in one or more of the deceptive shipping practices outlined in US State Department guidance issued in May 2020.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u2018or\u2019 of that and\/or covers quite some ground. In this case, the most obvious explanation is that the oil company needed a similar convoluted arrangement to that of the Norwegian hatchery in order to remain operational. Even considering the opaque ownership of this and other ship, it\u2019s difficult to discern the crime Russia has committed, or to conclude from available evidence that this ship could fairly be characterized as \u201csanctions-circumventing\u201d.<\/p>\n

Indeed, a ship designated as being part of Russia\u2019s so-called Shadow Fleet has nothing to do with illegal activity. A October 10th<\/sup> article in the Financial Times<\/em><\/a>, \u201cHow Russia\u2019s \u2018shadow fleet\u2019 gets its ships<\/em>\u201d clarifies for us that these ships are essentially just registered in ways to allow the continued export of Russian oil without involving entities in countries that have agreed to enforce the sanction\u2014<\/p>\n

\u201cSince the first western restrictions on Russian oil exports were introduced in December 2022, Moscow has assembled a fleet of more than 400 such vessels currently moving some 4mn barrels of oil a day beyond the reach of the sanctions and generating billions of dollars a year in additional revenue for its war in Ukraine\u2026It is not alleged that the transactions have broken any laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Yi Peng 3<\/em><\/h3>\n

In a similar story on December 12<\/a>, Swedish officials alleged that the Chinese vessel Yi Peng 3 damaged cables in the Baltic Sea on November 17 and 18. While the Chinese vessel returned to a Swedish port for over a month while the incident was investigated, permitting Swedish investigators to board it for an inspection, Sweden has alleged the ship did not wait long enough for the right prosecutor to inspect the ship.<\/p>\n

In this case, the Wall Street Journal reports<\/a> that the Chinese captain was \u201cinduced\u201d by Russian intelligence to cut the cables with the ship\u2019s anchor and that the ship \u201cincludes a Russian sailor.\u201d Fearing Russia behind every tree and under every rock, legacy media outlets accept their governments\u2019 suggestions of elaborate connections to suggest a conspiracy among all of NATO\u2019s adversaries. The reporting must not allow the public to make the simpler deduction that so many sanctions might induce greater cooperation among the countries without vested interests in these sanctions.<\/p>\n

The Nord Stream Pipelines<\/h2>\n

The Nord Stream pipelines are a network of pipelines to transport natural gas from Russia into Europe. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline came online in November 2011. 51% of its $8 billion price cost<\/a> came via Russian gas firm Gazprom, with the balance was split between German, French, and Dutch firms.<\/p>\n

Nord Stream 2, an additional pipeline, was built at a cost of $11 billion, but this time funded entirely by Gazprom. It was completed in September 2021 but never came onstream. If it had, the two underwater pipelines would have had a net<\/a> capacity to pump 110 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year across about 760 miles. Even without Nord Stream 2, about half of Germany\u2019s and over 40 percent of the EU\u2019s natural gas imports came from Russia before the Ukraine war.<\/p>\n

The US had long advocated against the pipeline project, discouraging its allies in the EU and NATO from relying upon Russia. The Trump administration had introduced sanctions to this effect<\/a> in December, 2019. In August, 2020, a cohort of republican senators threatened<\/a> the managers of the Nord Stream port in Germany with sanctions if they continued to provide support to the Russian ships completing the pipeline.<\/p>\n

Biden waived the sanctions<\/a> against the pipeline in May, 2021, but in retrospect this action likely had more to do with dissociating his administration from Trump\u2019s, as there was no difference of opinion between them on the issue of the pipeline.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Biden\u2019s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken stated during his confirmation hearing<\/a> in January, 2021 that \u201cI know [Biden\u2019s] strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2. That much I can tell you. I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the 22nd<\/sup> of January 2022, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland stated<\/a> that one way or another, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would not go forward if Russia invaded Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Two weeks later<\/a> on February 7th<\/sup>, Joe Biden publicly made a similarly threatening, if clumsy, statement\u2014 \u201cIf Russia invades again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.\u201d\u00a0 Asked what he meant by that, he added, \u201cI promise you we will be able to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The war began later that month.<\/p>\n

The Sabotage of the Pipelines<\/h2>\n

On September 26th<\/sup>, 2022, Swedish seismologists reported that measuring stations registered several underwater explosions, between the Danish and Swedish coasts of the Baltic Sea. The explosions, detonated at a depth of about 85 meters, ruptured both pipelines.<\/p>\n

Later studies estimated the amount of methane gas<\/a> that escaped from the pipeline to be 523 kilotons, of which 478 kilotons (478,000 tons) reached the earth\u2019s atmosphere\u2014the largest leak in recorded history of a gas highly impactful in heating the planet. Over 20 years, methane traps<\/a> about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n

Danish scientists also noted<\/a> that the blasts occurred within 20 kilometers of a WWII-era chemical weapons dumpsite, where 11,000 tons of chemical warfare agents were dumped in 1947.<\/p>\n

In the immediate aftermath of the explosions, western mainstream media sources already were asserting that Russia had blown up the pipelines:<\/p>\n