this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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My bet is that most of the manufacturers are not actually knowingly selling parts to Russia.
They're selling to some company in Turkey or China or somewhere. Then that company either sells to a shell company (if it's a distributor) and that shell company sells to Russia or directly sells to Russia. You can't just go imprison the CEO of random company in Turkey. If you could, this would be a lot easier.
What this is is saying that entire countries might get cut off if they don't enforce this. Which might be the only way to do it, but it would be potentially a pretty major economic schism, at least if this extends to something like China.
My guess is that of those, only Turkey and India legitimately buy a lot of components.
However, the problem is that if you either (a) cut off a country or (b) get the country to effectively enforce sanctions, Russia is going to switch to whatever country is the easiest remaining source. So if push comes to shove, it's probably not just gonna be those six countries. I suspect that the end game here is really that you probably have to have either (a) or (b) happen for the whole world, which is a pretty serious undertaking. You basically are having to create a huge economic partition in the world, where countries either fall into the Sanctioning Russia camp or the Can't Get Western Components camp. Can it be done? Yes. Is it going to be economically-disruptive? Yes. And you're gonna need to coordinate this across a number of component-supplying countries for this to work; you cannot have the US ban component X but not Y while the EU is banning component Y but not X.
Also, some countries have corrupt justice systems or the like, and I would guess, even if they want to restrict re-exports, may have difficulty doing so. If someone knows that they can just buy off a judge if they get prosecuted for re-exporting something to Russia, penalties may not be much of a deterrent.
So, yeah, economic power is a potent lever, but it's gonna take some doing to use it correctly.
My bet is that what's gonna have to happen is that there is going to have to be a narrowed list of components that aren't used in a lot of products other than Russian military hardware. Then those secondary sanctions get applied to just those. Like, Russia is still gonna be able to get voltage regulator chips or fuel pumps, but will have a hard time getting infrared CCDs.