Russia also wanted to avoid a price cap. The Group of 7, the European Union and Australia had restricted companies from providing insurance and other services in cases where Russian crude oil was sold above $60 a barrel, a cap the European Union and Britain have since dropped even lower. So ships affiliated with Russia began to use sketchy insurance or none at all. They started to fly third-country flags and to send false location information to cover up where they had loaded their cargo. By making it harder to tell if oil had come from Russia, they created an air of plausible deniability for oil buyers... he shadow fleet comes with an even more obvious drawback. It has “limited the cap’s efficacy,” America’s Government Accountability Office concluded in a report this month, keeping money flowing into Moscow’s coffers and helping it to fund the war in Ukraine. That doesn’t mean that the sanctions are a mistake, supporters say. Ben Harris, a former Biden administration Treasury official and an architect of the price cap, pointed out that the sanctions, even if imperfect, cost Russia. It’s expensive to ship oil to India or China and to build up the shadow fleet. “Enforcement is the real challenge,” he said. For now, countries are applying even more sanctions to combat the shadow fleet...

What are the odds the unstated goal of these sanctions is specifically to force Russia into practically giving away valuable natural resources to oil-thirsty capitalists, to mark up exponentially to make it look like it was acquired within the rules while also being able to whip up the common people about both energy prices and accidents, or anything else they can blame on Russia?