How Trump Humiliated Putin on the High Seas
The president did not so much call Russia’s bluff as dismiss it outright, making official the view we've long espoused that the former superpower is a Potemkin village, a czar without clothes.
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NOTE: The shadow fleet is composed of unflagged or false flagged ships: smugglers, essentially. It is the lifeline by which Russia sells the oil that finances its war, and by which Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba cling to life. The latter aside, the chief recipient is China, which gets 40% of its oil illicitly in this manner.
The shadow fleet exists because of sanctions. And yet clearly trade has continued, to the great benefit of the world’s rogue states.
That game is over.
With the capture of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s oil is offline for both China and Cuba: the former will manage, the latter cannot. But Donald Trump is not content to stop there. He has repeatedly offered Vladimir Putin the carrot: peace on decent terms, reconstruction investment, re-entry in…
