INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The pressure of Western sanctions saw Russia scramble to maintain its market power as a key energy exporter, as well as preserve the supply
and Venezuela before it, to operate in an increasingly opaque economic environment relying on an increasingly complex web of
Accordingly, the market price of the Urals blend, as assessed by Western agencies such as Argus and cited by officials, served as a credible
China and India using the so-called "shadow fleet," ships that do not use Western services and are therefore not subject to restrictions
the Argus methodology lost relevance because it was tied to European sales, analysts used their own market sources and customs statistics
for countries such as India, a major consumer of Russian seaborne oil, to infer that the real prices of Russian oil were higher than those
reflect these trends and incorporated information on Russian sales to China into their estimates, but there is still no single benchmark
think tank, uses satellite tracking to determine the volume of Russian oil transported, while customs data from importing countries such as
transparency, and there are suspicions that the growing amount of money never actually returns to Russia, but sits in the accounts of the
relatively low price to a company registered in, say, Fujairah in the UAE, and that company in turn sells the same batch of oil at a higher
estimated that Russian banks and companies acquired $147 billion in new assets abroad in 2022 alone, with little known about their physical
delayed repatriation of funds to Russia from foreign partners amid the threat of secondary sanctions as a reason for the increase in
Russia's foreign financial assets
money the Kremlin has stashed away under the control of Russian and foreign companies, but the sum of liquid funds it can easily tap into is
likely to be in the range of a few tens of billions, not hundreds, said Maximillian Hess, the founder of Enmetena Advisory and a Foreign
on data from Russia's trading partners, leaks of Russian classified data, and commercial data providers such as ImportGenuis to arrive at
credible estimates.On the surface, EU trade with Russia plummeted after the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, reaching a post-Cold War
It's just that these goods don't go directly to Russia, but are shipped through intermediary countries such as Turkey, UAE, China and
goods needed for its military in the first 10 months of 2023, only 10% less than it imported before sanctions were imposed, according to a
country, such as Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan, and use it to buy Western goods and then import them directly into Russia or via Belarus
This method works well for goods that are not of high priority for military use, such as luxury clothing or textile and woodworking
country's counterintelligence service through the website Nag
The platform used a network of suppliers in China to evade sanctions.The newspaper also documented the use of Moroccan ports to ship
seller are becoming increasingly important.Just as the Kremlin increasingly relies on intermediaries for its illicit trade, journalists,
officials and analysts have exposed Russian sanctions-busting schemes using the analysis of existing data, as well as their own sources
Siddi, too, argued that Western government agencies would have to do more "complex work" if they want to tighten energy restrictions on
Russia, and it is unclear whether they would achieve their goals anyway as Moscow has so far shown resilience to oil sanctions in
particular.Similarly, the KSE report called for the creation of an electronic tracking system for sanctioned goods and the strengthening of
sanctions-busting: Western investment in trade monitoring is likely to be more effective than the fees the Russians pay to their
West spends on improving sanctions monitoring, Russia loses ten by bleeding more and more of its money to various interlocutors and shadow
distribution chains and strengthening the work of Western agencies should put enough pressure on Russia over time to make a difference,
subject to stricter controls to make it harder for the Russians to get their hands on technical gear."Some say we don't need sanctions at
all, that they're useless just because the Russian economy hasn't ground to a halt, but this is a complex and grinding process
We are already seeing banks around the world, including Russia's neighbors, tightening their compliance, while the production rate of
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