Shipping

Guyana’s rapid economic expansion and new port development could make the country a more important cocaine transshipment point as U.S. military strikes in and near Venezuela disrupt established trafficking routes.

Russian military veterans, including former Wagner mercenaries and men linked to the GRU, have been deployed aboard tankers in Moscow’s “shadow fleet” moving sanctioned oil through the Baltic Sea.

A German logistics company has exploited gaps in European postal and customs rules to move sanctioned goods from Germany to Russia, undermining the EU’s effort to choke off supplies to Moscow.

An investigative news outlet on Thursday launched a searchable online database containing nearly 3,200 financial disclosure records for more than 1,500 Trump-appointed federal officials, detailing extensive financial ties between senior members of the administration and the industries they regulate.

The United States is temporarily easing sanctions on Russian oil sales to India with a 30-day waiver aimed at preventing supply shortages and cushioning a sharp rise in crude prices after U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran.

Artificial intelligence is making sanctions and export-control evasion schemes harder to detect by enabling the creation of realistic fake companies and phony documentation used to obviate international trade restrictions.

A record mismatch in official trade statistics is complicating efforts to measure how far the U.S. and China have “decoupled,” according to Bloomberg, which cited an $112-billion gap between what Beijing said it exported to the United States and what U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded as arriving.

Waste crime and trafficking is expanding globally, fueled by profit incentives in a fast-growing waste-management industry and compounded by major blind spots in official data, according to a newly released report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 

Western governments marked the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine with new measures targeting the Kremlin’s revenue streams and enabling networks, despite stalled efforts by the EU to approve a broad sanctions package.

The UK unveiled its biggest Russia sanctions package in years on Tuesday, targeting Moscow’s shadow fleet and the key networks and infrastructure that have helped keep crude exports flowing since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war.