On industrializing the sanctions process
Or, I'm Sorry But We're Not Going To Sanction 12,000 People At Once
Ukraine has a list of 12,000 people it wants to designate for personal sanctions, according to multiple Ukrainian news outlets (Kyiv Independent, Ukrainian NGO).
This sounds great - 12,000 sounds low actually - but I don't think this is going to work without essentially industrializing the American sanctions designation and compliance process.
Again, juxtapositions make this clear.
That number - 12,000 people - sounds impressive, but if you look at the context, I think it's actually an underestimate if we're talking about people who are directly responsible for espousing erasure of Ukrainian national identity and dehumanization of Ukrainians. This is the basis for some of the genocide allegations in the New Lines Institute/Raoul Wallenberg Centre report.
It's difficult to distinguish opinion polling from reality in Russia, even the very good opinion polls, because people are just afraid to answer honestly in a lot of cases, but some degree of that support for an essentially genocidal war of aggression inside Russia is real, and that has an approval rating that is recurrently around 80%. Given the sheer size of Russia (144.1 million people) the idea that only 0.008% are directly responsible just doesn't sound on-face right to me at all.
Moreover, the way that the list is structured - 12,000 individuals - doesn’t make sense in terms of prioritization. Go for just the really, really important ones financially - not just high-profile targets (HPTs) like people who commit war crimes or command battalion tactical groups, but rather people where "taking them out" in terms of resources kills an entire system, like the "bratva" gangsters, the oligarchs and their retinues of flatterers and sycophants and hangers-on, the policy-makers - true "high-value targets" (HVTs), then I'd say you'd be down to a much smaller list, on the order of the single-digit thousands.
Divide those up into organizations and institutions and sanction the institutions, and I suspect that number is even smaller in sheer number of designations, but much larger in terms of people affected.
So, suppose we sanction the CEO and the chairman of the board of a bank, as well as the bank. We don't need to sanction, like, the bank teller or the assistant to the regional manager somewhere. They are already treated as if they were sanctioned themselves to a significant extent by virtue of working in the employ of a sanctioned entity.
If any entities are owned by that bank in a proportion greater than 50%, those entities are effectively treated as if sanctioned too. Even in cases where, say, a company is owned by a company that is not sanctioned, but the owning company is itself owned by another company that is sanctioned, the sanctions extend all the way down the chain.
With the exception of specific penalties like travel restrictions and personal asset seizures reserved for sanctioned persons like drug cartel kingpins, arms dealers or oligarchs, working for a sanctioned entity is already a pretty damn bad idea.
Even if we do take that entire list, parse through it, and action the highest-profile offenders and clusters of offenders, I don't think we even have the institutional capacity to handle a lot of them.
The basic problem is that we are talking about approximately 240 Federal employees who are running this thing as of November 2020, 40 of whom had left during 2019.
In contrast to activist groups and, I increasingly suspect, private intelligence contractors, they don't run a 3:1 research::operations ratio - it's more like 1:7 going the other way. There are about 30 people who actually do designations research, 31 if they managed to hire someone from that job announcement in December that I saw. It looks like they’re hiring up, from perusing job sites, but we’re still talking an agency that appears to have historically had a size somewhere around 200 people - in 2013, when 8 people left.
Unless you put at least some of those people into a role where they are verifying and confirming, rather than conducting original OSINT research, there is simply no way they are getting through 12,000 designation requests before the end of the decade.
And OFAC is not going to just pass them through; that’s just a non-starter. I'm a U.S. national packaging together 45-page research dumps accompanied by signed affidavits on pain of perjury, letters on Beltway lawyer letterhead signed by former State Department employees who worked on sanctions policy, and PowerPoints with dozens of endnotes in MLA format, and even with me, OFAC still has to verify and double-check (probably triple-check) what I send them.
We support Ukraine, we are definitely on their side in this, but the United States of America is not going to just sanction 12,000 Rando McRandomvich Russian cats because another country said so, even if it’s Ukraine
What you're going to need, if Ukraine is really serious about this and if we are, is going to look a lot more like an arbitrarily scalable volunteer and contractor industry that feeds sanctions designations into OFAC. This already exists, in the sense of relatively secretive private intelligence companies, activist groups and law firms that maintain sanctions-designations research capabilities; but this is not a field that is capable of dividing up and processing 12,000 names all at once, I don’t think.
It is already somewhat difficult to make money from freelance sanctions designations (other than through donations) that isn't somehow problematic. I could become a vehicle for foreign agents to try to influence our sanctions policy, for instance, if I worked based on targets recommended by donors; and I can't blackmail people with sanctions designations, I'm pretty sure that is wildly, wildly illegal. If I'd said, for example, with the pension system, "hey, Galina Sagaydakova, Venmo me $100k or else this goes public" that would probably be a very, very good way to get into a lot of interesting and exotic legal trouble ("in other news, local man Joohn Choe was indicted by a Federal grand jury for an international blackmail scheme in the separatist territories of Ukraine, news at 11!"). You could probably short-sell or essentially insider-trade off of it - there are short-sellers in the United States who already do something very similar - but even then, we're talking about risky transactions (you have to bet on what OFAC is going to act on or not) in an already risky environment (foreign stock exchanges). It doesn't strike me as a good look.
There's probably a business model out there; if it’s there, it's just a question of finding it and attaining product-to-market fit after experimenting, if not for me, then for the other competitors in this market.
On a larger scale than just me, though, if we’re really talking about not only processing this list of 12,000 targets but more generally continuing to use sanctions policy as a centerpiece of how we approach geostrategic problems… either the kind of “shops” that work on sanctions designation are going to need to expand and coordinate a lot, or a lot of people are going to need to work at a GS-8 to GS-13 position that pays less than the private sector.