Law, Power, and Justice

LIFE AND NEWS NOTES FROM A CHILDLESS CAT LADY (AS PER Vance) BEAVERING AWAY IN ONE OF THE SUB-BASEMENTS OF THE MINISTRY OF SNARK

—————————————————Saturday 18 July 2026

RUSSIA – UKRAINE

Article: “Ukraine strikes warehouses of ‘Russian Amazon’ in revenge attack.” (7/18/26) Yahoo News.

· “A Ukrainian drone attack on a logistics centre belonging to the Russian equivalent of Amazon has caused clouds of smoke so large they have darkened the skies across the Moscow region.”

· “Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said the Wildberries depots were used to “supply sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment” and described the strikes as retaliation for Moscow’s attacks on “our civilian infrastructure”.

· Eight warehouse workers were killed and 62 injured in the strikes, Russian officials said.

· By Saturday morning, a cloud of thick black smoke had spread from Elektrostal across almost 2,000 square miles, according to satellite imagery. It blocked out the sun in nearby towns.”

Article: “Ukraine has cut Crimea off from Russia.” Al Jazeera. (7/18/26).

· “The Ukrainian side has reported the destruction of more than 170 vessels in the Azov and Black Seas, and this is not the end—the campaign continues.

· The head of the Crimean occupation administration Sergey Aksyonov acknowledged problems with gasoline sales and power outages. The region has begun using generators and imposing restrictions on businesses.”

Article: “Russia says foreign troops sent to Ukraine after a peace deal would be legitimate targets. (7/15/26).

· Russia said on Wednesday that any multinational force sent by Ukraine’s allies to deploy there in the event of a peace deal would be unacceptable to Moscow, which would view it as a threat and a legitimate military target.

· Western allies in the pro-Ukraine “coalition of the willing” met in Paris this week and reaffirmed their intention to deploy such a force after a cessation of hostilities, in order to reassure Ukraine and help it to regenerate its forces.

· They also said that exercises would take place in the coming months to demonstrate the ability of the planned force, known as the Multinational Force for Ukraine (MNF-U), to act.”

Article: “Ukraine targets Moscow with 200 drones in large-scale attack, mayor says.” ABC NEWS.

· “ At least 200 Ukrainian drones were launched toward Moscow overnight into Thursday morning….Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces downed at least 375 Ukrainian drones overnight. The ministry said in a post to Telegram that drones were intercepted over 18 Russian regions — including Moscow — as well as Crimea, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

· Ukraine has been significantly expanding its drone campaign — referred to in Kyiv as “long-range sanctions” — in recent months, targeting major Russian cities, Russian oil infrastructure, military and logistics targets.”

· “As of Thursday, the mayor had reported more than 1,200 Ukrainian drones flying toward Moscow during the previous seven days, of which he said at least 191 were shot down as they approached the city.

· The Russian Defense Ministry publishes only the number of Ukrainian drones and other projectiles it claims to have intercepted.”

· “But the increasing scale and rate of such reports could be seen as indicative of Ukraine’s growing ability and willingness to target sites within Russia.”

· Flights operating from all four of Moscow’s international airports were also put under temporary flight restrictions overnight, Rosaviatsiya said.

Article: Why it is time for the west to crush putin’s war economy. Time. 7/16/26.

· Graham introduced the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025, to tighten sanctions against Russia, with strong bipartisan support and the apparent blessing of President Donald Trump.

· “The Graham sanctions legislation under consideration would impose 500% secondary tariffs, property-blocking sanctions on any financial institution owned by Russia or by individuals within the Russian government, and further banking sanctions. This Sanctioning Russia Act, perhaps soon to be renamed the Lindsey Graham Act in his memory, would deal a serious blow that could, at last, end Vladimir Putin’s bloody and imperialistic invasion of Ukraine.”

· “despite all of this critical support, the West has had the power to end this war long ago—and at relatively modest cost—had it possessed the consistency to match its spirit with its actions.”

· “ Beyond superior military power and a unified diplomatic voice, the West holds overwhelming economic power. The Ankara gathering promoted a comforting fiction of joint action, an exercise in self-congratulation that obscured an uncomfortable truth: the private sector has fought this war with greater consistency and greater courage than many of the governments now praising one another.”

· “Economic sanctions are coercive tools by which governments compel compliance under threat of legal penalty. Voluntary corporate exits, by contrast, carry moral weight and genuine market power. When boards and CEOs independently concluded that Putin’s Russia had become both legally indefensible and commercially uninvestable, it was a major blow to Putin’s propaganda, his global standing, and his economic position.These two approaches—government actions and private actions—are designed to function as a one-two punch, much as they did against apartheid South Africa. Sanctions prevent principled firms from being undercut by opportunistic competitors. Corporate withdrawal deprives the Kremlin of what legislation alone cannot reach: technology, capital and legitimacy. For four years, the corporate punch has landed. It is the government punch that has repeatedly been pulled, with western governments repeatedly relaxing sanctions on Russia precisely when they should be tightening them.”

· “Consider the loosening of enforcement of energy sanctions on Russia. In March, April, and May, the Treasury Department repeatedly issued or extended general licenses allowing Russian crude already at sea to be sold and unloaded. Officials defended the waivers as measures to stabilize energy markets. The timing could hardly have been worse: the pressure had been on the verge of fracturing Putin’s economic hold. By Dec. 2025, Urals crude had fallen below $40 per barrel.

· Oil and gas revenues had declined to their smallest share of Russia’s budget in two decades. The International Monetary Fund projected growth of just 0.8 percent. Then came the waivers. Russian crude exports climbed from 4.9million barrels per day in February to six million by May, and the failure to enforce Russian energy sanctions has since allowed Putin to continue reaping windfall profits from elevated oil prices.”

· France became Europe’s largest importer of Russian LNG by 2024, helping Russia build export facilities it did not previously have, even as President Emmanuel Macron urged greater strategic resolve in standing up to Russia. Le Monde reported that condensate from a Total Energies joint venture had been refined into jet fuel powering Russian aircraft attacking Ukrainian cities. The company denied wrongdoing, sold one affected stake and retained the rest.

· Titanium tells a similar story. Boeing abandoned Russian titanium within weeks of the invasion and successfully rebuilt its supply chain through allied countries. Airbus, by contrast—then sourcing roughly half of its titanium from VSMPO-AVISMA, a firm linked with Rostec, the Russian state-owned defense company—argued against sanctions on Russian titanium. Airbus’s chief executive warned that sanctioning Russian titanium would amount to “sanctioning ourselves,” and the company chose brazen opportunism and stepped into the void left by Boeing.

· Austria’s government has failed to rein in Raiffeisen Bank, which has remained the largest Western bank operating in Russia—at times generating roughly half of the banking group’s profits while paying hundreds of millions of euros annually into the Russian treasury. The French billionaire Mulliez family’s Auchan supermarkets never left Russia, insisting that their mission was simply to feed civilians.

· Germany presents another telling example. German exports to Kyrgyzstan, a country of just seven million people, have increased roughly tenfold since the invasion. Kyrgyzstan simply became a major re-export corridor into Russia. The country has also emerged as a hub for criminal cryptocurrency activity, facilitating illicit cryptocurrency exchanges and serving as a home for A7A5, the Russian-backed stablecoin. Financial regulators in the country allow Western sanctioned cryptocurrency companies to operate freely.

· Yet Europe has extended Kyrgyzstan highly favorable trade conditions through the Generalized Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+), which allows the country to export more than 6,200 categories of goods to the EU market duty-free. Meanwhile, uncontrolled Greek shipowners have profited by selling dozens of aging tankers into Russia’s shadow fleet, helping sustain sanctions evasion while contributing to mounting environmental risks.

· The failure is not confined to Europe. India’s refiners, which purchased almost no Russian crude before the war, now source as much as 40% of their imports from Russia before exporting refined products back to Western markets at a premium. Against this backdrop, the consistency of the corporate exodus, led overwhelmingly by American firms, is all the more striking. Of the more than 1,500 companies we continue to monitor, over 1,000 have reduced or ended their Russian operations beyond anything legally required.

· The most significant backsliding has come disproportionately from German, French, Indian, Chinese, and Uzbek firms, all publicly identified and graded in our database. Even Putin has warned that Western companies that “slammed the door” should not expect an easy return. American companies, by and large, kept their word. Too many governments did not.

· How to stop the Kremlin from avoiding sanctions

· The question hanging over Ankara was not whether economic pressure works. The real question is whether elected governments can match the determination that so many private companies have already demonstrated. So far, they have come up woefully short.

· Making it worse, Russia has found increasingly clever ways to evade existing sanctions, and the existing sanctions regime is plainly failing to keep pace. As Alexander Browder has found in his groundbreaking research, the so-called A7 network—a privately owned Russian payments platform that is aligned with the Russian government and faces sanctions—moves an estimated $90 billion annually, more than half of Russia’s entire military budget.

· Yet the A7 network has been the target of just a single government sanction, which the Senate Banking Committee itself described as “clearly insufficient.” Its flagship financial instrument, the A7A5 stablecoin is backed by a sanctioned Russian defense bank. And yet, it has inexplicably remained beyond the reach of government sanctions.The prescription is straightforward: deploy a far more complete and comprehensive set of economic sanctions against Russia; dismantle its shadow financing network—A7A5 chief among them—by cutting off the enablers operating within Kyrgyzstan and other intermediary countries; sanction the shadow fleet vessel by vessel to stop the illicit flow of Russian oil; impose meaningful secondary tariffs; and stop accommodating European companies—Total Energies, Airbus, and Raiffeisen among them—whose conduct has actively helped Russia rebuild its economic capabilities.

· The historical precedent is instructive. In 1992, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the towering anti-apartheid voice of South Africa, told one of us that government sanctions against Pretoria had been widely dismissed by the white South African establishment as neo-colonialism, until the private sector joined in with a stampede of some 200 firms exiting the country, led by General Motors, IBM and Coca-Cola.

· The lesson was clear then and remains clear now: the coordination of the left hand of government with the right hand of business matters profoundly. Researchers studying spinal mechanics have demonstrated that lifting a 50-pound object with two hands is biomechanically and neurologically less taxing than lifting two individual 25-pound weights—each hand working alone strains what both hands together could manage with ease. More than 1,200 companies did their part. They held the line through the grueling years of war, resisting the pull of profits and the pressure of Kremlin retaliation. Now governments must step up and show the same determination and courage in applying more comprehensive sanctions on Russia.”

Article: “Ukraine war briefing: Protests of Fedorov’s dismissal continue…” 7/18/26. Guardian.

· Thousands gathered outside the presidential office for a second day in Ukraine following a surprise governmental reshuffle.

· The Guardian describes him as “popular and innovative.”

· Zelensky claims he was forced to chose between sides when what he wanted was “unity.”

Article: “Russian courts target two outspoken critics of war in Ukraine.” 7/17/26 MSN

· “Russian authorities have detained a blogger who criticized President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine and fined an anti-war politician, as Moscow sends a warning signal to critics of the Kremlin ahead of September’s parliamentary election.

· Although Putin maintains a near-total grip on power, he and the dominant United Russia party are under pressure in the lead-up to the vote as Russia grapples with an economic slowdown and fuel shortages triggered by Ukrainian attacks on oil refineries.”

· “Previously a pro-Kremlin figure, Remeslo published a manifesto that went viral on social media in March entitled “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin”. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he spent about a month. TASS said he could receive 10 years in prison if convicted.

· Separately, Boris Nadezhdin, a politician who attempted to run against Putin in the 2024 presidential election on an anti-war ticket, was fined 1,000 roubles ($13) for displaying “extremist symbols”.”

· “The Kremlin says strict censorship laws are needed to keep Russia united during what it calls an existential confrontation with the West.”

· The liberal Yabloko party, which opposes the war in Ukraine, has also had several members disqualified from elections. Last month, its deputy chair, Maxim Kruglov, was jailed for seven years, convicted of spreading “military fakes”.

ISRAEL

Article: “Mandani, Netanyahu should be arrested…” 7/18/26) The Times of Israel.

· “New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in an interview published Saturday that he believes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested for war crimes if he visits the city in September for the United Nations General Assembly, but indicated that he would not try to amend laws to do so.

· Speaking to The New York Times, Mamdani was asked about his campaign pledge to arrest Netanyahu, who has been accused of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel.

· “I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague. He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court. And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years,” Mamdani said.

· “I’ve also said that I will follow the laws that we have here in New York City because I believe that there is an importance in following the law as a leader who presides over our city,” he said, indicating that he would not seek to actively follow up on his threat.”

Article: Court blocks planned Likud vote over disputed primary rules. 7/18/26. The Jerusalem Post.

CUBA

Article: “Does Cuba really have Iranian drones. Foreign Policy.

· Experts say that Trump is laying the pretext for an invasion of Cuba by accusing them of stockpiling Iranian drones.