Sanctions and Redirection

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(Photo by Zoran Jagodic at Scopio)

Announcing sanctions is one thing. Implementing them is something else.

During the Cold War, a long list of technologies were embargoed. To make nuclear bombs, the USSR started by using its spies to get the most essential information from the USA. Other types of high technology were easier. Steal designs for a computer, then manufacture and assemble all the parts? No, that would have been the hard way. Intercept computers being shipped to legitimate addresses and spirit them away to the USSR? Much easier! So that’s what they did.

This is not something I got from gossip or speculation.

Late in the Cold War, a woman from Moscow joined the group I was working in. She and her family had been striving for a decade to get out. They had only been in the USA a matter of months. She spoke English well enough for us to converse.

She read English even better. Her job in the USSR had been translating technical manuals for stolen computers so they could be programmed and used there. On her own time, she read English literature. She knew English-language classics better than I did. Being caught in possession of any of the books we discussed would have gotten her sent to a gulag. Our favorite to discuss was Animal Farm, obviously. Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others…

We also compared sayings. Common sayings in English generally have a parallel in Russian, with one notable exception. Russian apparently has no equivalent for “every cloud has a silver lining.”

That’s worth remembering. With a history as bleak as so much of Russia’s, we cannot expect them to see the world the same way most of the West does.

We know what they did about sanctions and embargoes in the past.

Ordinary people there past a certain age remember how they got by when everything was scarce. If a shop had something in stock, they bought it and then traded with someone who had what they actually needed. They can revive those skills, teach those skills to younger generations and carry on with life no matter how hard sanctions bite.

But as we’re learning from news about the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military is already using equipment that is often outdated and sometimes unsuitable. Russia will have an insatiable appetite for modern technology to update its military equipment, and probably also to take over business facilities abandoned by or taken from non-Russian companies that are pulling out.

Shipments of anything that is sanctioned will begin to go missing again.

Make sure the ones that disappear aren’t yours.