Europe's Russian sanctions regime is not as watertight as you it seems

An interesting article in the New York Times points out some of the glaring inconsistencies in the supposedly unanimous consensus of Europe's sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

While the political rhetoric stresses the across-the-board concurrence of Europe's sanctions regime, with the possible high-profile exception of Germany's gas imports, it's clear that behind the scenes some other placatory deals have been struck, some of them quite important chinks in the supposedly hermetic armour of European sanctions.

For example, Russian diamonds have been given a completely free pass. The $2.4 billion a year lucrative trade in Russian rough diamonds, almost all of which goes into the port of Antwerp, Belgium continues completely unharmed, even though Belgium insists that it has not officially requested, or insisted on, an exception for the diamond trade from the list of Russian sanctions. How, then, has such an important (and non-essential) item been allowed to remain unsanctioned? Blood diamonds, indeed.

Uranium for civil nuclear power production is another such inexplicable omission. Hungary, Slovakia, Finland and especially France rely entirely on Russian uranium for their nuclear programs, work around $200 million a year according to Greenpeace. How has that managed to persist, and why is no-one talking about it?

And then there is the very specific case Greek-owned tankers transporting Russian oil to all sorts of non-European destinations. Oil itself has been sanctioned, but Greece, which apparently transports over half of Russia's oil for some historical reason, is facilitating one of Moscow's most important revenue streams. Greece has somehow managed to specifically negotiate this hole in Europe's defences, although there is also a behind-the-scenes, unspoken, implicit agreement that Russia needs to continue trading oil in other to avert a complete meltdown in the global oil market, which is, you know, sacrosanct.

What kind of a message does all this send? How do the long-suffering citizens of Middle Europe feel amid the shortages and the price increases when they see some countries and some industries pursuing business as usual? How does Ukraine feel? (Well, Mr. Zelenskyy has been pretty forthright about how he feels on many of these specific issues.) I guess this stuff is being talked about in the European Parliament, but why am I only finding out about it now?