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Bulletins and News Discussion from July 7th to July 13th, 2025 - Sanctions on Russia: The Sequel

Image is of the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline, which transports gas from Russia to China. This isn't an oil pipeline (such as the ESPO) but I thought it looked cool. Source here.

Trump has recently proposed a 500% tariff on goods from countries that trade with Russia, including India and China (who buy ~70% of Russia's oil output), as well as a 10% additional tariff on goods from countries that "align themselves with BRICS." Considering that China is the largest trading partner of most of the countries on the planet at this point, and India and Brazil are reasonably strong regional players, I'm not sure what exactly "alignment" means, but it could be pretty bad.

Sanctions and tariffs on Russian products have been difficult to achieve in practice. It's easy to write an order to sanction Russia, but much harder to actually enforce these sorts of things because of, for example, the Russian shadow oil fleet, or countries like Kazakhstan acting as covert middlemen (well, as covert as a very sudden oil export boom can be).

Considering that China was pretty soundly victorious last time around, I'm cautiously optimistic, especially because China and India just outright cutting off their supply of energy and fuel would be catastrophic to them (and if Iran and Israel go to war again any time in the near future, it'll only be more disastrous). Barring China and India kowtowing to Trump and copying Europe vis-a-vis Nordstream 2 (which isn't impossible, I suppose), the question is whether China and India will appear to accede to these commands while secretly continuing trade with Russia through middlemen, or if they will be more defiant in the face of American pressure.

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893 comments

  • A Ukrainian Antonov AN-124 transport/cargo aircraft was spotted flying over Kyiv/Kiev today, and made it's way to Poland shortly afterwards, in other words it was not shot down. The first time a rearward Ukrainian assest has been seen flying over the Ukrainian capital since the start of the war.

    Source

    • Either Russia fucking sucks at war or they know this Antonov is carrying someone too important to kill.

    • That's pretty bizarre. Even if Russia wasn't able to shoot it down at that moment, it's still super risky to fly big planes there for no good reason.

      • It seems to be a newly refurbished aircraft. Maybe it was been worked on in Ukraine and is being evacuated now? Very weird because the closest distance between Kyiv/Kiev and Russia is about 200km via the Chernihiv direction, and 300km via Sumy, where the frontline is active. Such a large and immobile target should be well within range of a high altitude R-37M launch by a MiG-31, or a 40N6E launch from S-400 or S-300V4.

893 comments