May 10, 2025: In addition to sending military and economic aid to Ukraine, NATO nations have also, since 2014, been imposing ever more effective economic sanctions on Russia. While economic sanctions sound good in theory, in practice the target of the sanctions is continuously finding ways to evade the sanctions.

The primary way to evade sanctions is to obtain needed weapons components from companies that operate in smuggler friendly countries like the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. China initially discouraged local smugglers from dealing with Russia. China is the largest exporter in the world and feared angering customers. Later, China found that its customers were more interested in getting their Chinese goods than in blocking Russian smuggling efforts.

While Russia was able to cope with the sanctions, Ukrainian attacks on Russian manufacturing facilities and energy infrastructure were doing significant damage. The oil export sanctions had limited success, but every little success made thing more difficult for Russia.

For example, sanctions made it more difficult to export petroleum. This is the main Russian export and the major source of income for the Russian government and war effort. To evade this sanction, Russia created a shadow fleet of over a hundred tankers purchased or leased abroad and obtained unrestricted access to a Chinese smuggler haven maintained in Hong Kong.

The nations enforcing the sanctions, particularly the United States, tracked the routes of the Russian shadow fleet and noted the key role Hong Kong plays in arranging the movement of sanctioned Russian oil to its primary customers in China and India. Hong Kong is also a major source for supplying sanctioned nations with weapons and munitions to Russia. Hong Kong does this by allowing Russian tankers and cargo ships, operating with fake credentials to disguise their Russian affiliation, to bring in Russian oil and other raw materials. The Russian ships then leave Hong Kong carrying weapons for their war in Ukraine.

Another major player in the Russian smuggling effort is North Korea. For years North Korea has been buying small, secondhand cargo and tanker ships and using them for smuggling. A favored evasion technique consists of taking on or transferring cargo at sea in its own territorial waters. The North Korean merchant fleet consists of about 134 ships, with most purchased from Chinese firms.

North Korea is a notorious and persistent maritime smuggler. Because of North Korean smuggling, the United States expanded its maritime smuggling and sanctions enforcement program in 2018 when a new multi-national enforcement organization was created. Initial members were the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain, France, South Korea, and Japan. The Enforcement Coordination Cell or ECC is enforcing the UN sanctions that curb North Korean smuggling related to items needed for their nuclear and ballistic missile programs. In addition, the ECC allowed member nations to also enforce whatever other sanctions or naval missions their government put a priority on. The U.S. later invited India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines to join and assist with monitoring growing Chinese violation of offshore water rights, especially in the South China Sea and other areas of the West Pacific.

The ECC concentrates on the 2,000-kilometer-long shipping lane from the Indian Ocean, through the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea to North Korea. Along this route there are not only North Korean flagged ships participating in smuggling, but even more Chinese, Taiwanese, Liberian, Sri Lankan, and ships that are independent and fly whatever flag they believe will keep them from getting seized for smuggling. Earlier U.S. efforts had already identified many North Korean and Iranian owned tankers and cargo ships that were often engaged in smuggling. This led Iran and North Korea to use their own ships less and willing foreign ships instead. These third-party ships are the ones the ECC sought to identify. These ships can be identified, along with their owners and the owners can have banking and other sanctions placed on them. Many nations, not part of the ECC, but economic partners with ECC members, will cooperate if a smuggler ship visits one of their ports. At that point the captain can be arrested and the ship impounded.

The ECC member warships do not depend on inspecting suspicious ships while at sea, but instead on confirming who is where and when. This is especially useful for spotting smugglers who often turn off their location beacons and continue in running dark mode. These location beacons transmit current ID and location to any nearby ships and often, via satellite, to their owner and international shipping organizations. The location data, past and current, can be found on several public websites. The beacons exist mainly as a safety measure for ships operating at night or in bad weather in heavily used shipping lanes. Smugglers have learned how to turn off their beacons near a port where, it is assumed, they have docked or anchored off the coast waiting for an available dock.

Some smugglers are using spoofing, a form of jamming that just modifies the beacon signal to present a false location. This is where warships and maritime aircraft come in as these can identify ships visually or using radar followed by visual inspection. This is more damaging to the smugglers because it provides more evidence that their ship was involved in smuggling and with enough evidence you can go after the ship owners and seize the ship whenever it enters coastal waters, within 22 kilometers of land belonging to a nation that will seize outlaw ships.

For any sanctions to work they must quickly adapt to enemy adaptations. Effective sanctions are not a one-time thing, but a constant battle with each side continually seeking to gain an edge.