Donald Trump just hit Russia where it hurts
For all of the caterwauling about Trump’s supposed pro-Russia sympathies, his decision to strike at Russia’s “ghost fleet” is unprecedented—and likely to cause enormous pain to the Kremlin.
For nearly a decade, President Donald Trump’s domestic enemies have spread the word that he is little more than a Russian dupe—who admires Vladimir Putin and seeks to emulate his style of leadership, if not take orders from him directly. These claims have never had much to support them. Yet they continue to circulate, likely because they have a grain of truth at their center. Trump does respect Putin’s strength. He has treated the Russian president as the leader of a great power, rather than a pariah—a state of affairs intolerable to those who would rather imagine Putin on trial at the Hague.
Nevertheless, claims that Trump is “soft” on Putin miss the mark. The 47th president has pursued a very significant strategy of weakening the economic pillar that has been propping up the Russian Federation’s war machine for the last few years, as it moves with brute force into neighboring Ukraine.
Trump Is Attacking Russia’s “Ghost Fleet”
Despite the sanctions and all the caterwauling from Western sources, Moscow has stood strong. Indeed, Russia’s ongoing prosperity despite those sanctions has made it a symbol of resistance to America’s other adversaries and a source of frustration for the West.
That is, until Trump came along—and decided to use American military power to dismantle Russia’s so-called “ghost fleet,” as part of an overall effort to truly enforce many of the sanctions that went mostly ignored until recently.
Successive US administrations had the option to pursue this strategy. Yet even President Joe Biden, who was far more vocally hawkish on Russia than Trump has been, demurred. Trump has shown no such uncertainty. In so doing, the Americans are removing a critical component of Rus
Why Sanctions Alone Never Broke Russia
Russia’s ghost fleet has served as a brilliant way to bypass the global sanctions regime that has attempted—and mostly failed—to choke Russia off economically. With their ghost fleet, Russia, a commodities superpower, can illicitly sell oil and gas around the world and generate billions in annual revenue.
That ghost fleet, therefore, is the mechanism that allows for the Russian war machine to roll on and for the Putin government to operate without much in the way of disruption to ordinary patterns of life for most Russian citizens.
All the G7 nations imposed onerous price caps and oil embargoes on Russia to stymie the sale of Russian commodities. The ghost fleet allows Russia to evade these Western-imposed price caps.
This fleet of older, uninsured tankers employs highly deceptive tactics to evade the global sanctions regime. Such tactics, like deactivating AIS transponders, switching the names of their ships, and engaging in frequent ship-to-ship cargo transfers to avoid searches and seizures on the High Seas—along with registering under flags of convenience to hide their true origins—are highly effective at evading international scrutiny.
sia’s wartime economy—at a crucial moment in the war.
