> There is no evidence suggesting that any of those companies are running afoul of US sanctions laws and knowingly exporting their technology to be used in the drones
Sounds like just standard parts rather than sensitive equipment.
Sounds like just standard parts rather than sensitive equipment.
If you're a lawful citizen and by mistake take one to the airport and get caught with it, would be a lot of trouble, but criminals will just ignore than warning, buy a few hundreds and smuggle them through land or sea no problem.
If these components were allowed to be purchased by civilians without a specialized license, then the companies can't really be blamed for it. There's no way to prevent things like that from being smuggled abroad.
Russia has had issues with not having enough optics, so there's speculation that the Russian NODs for sale to American LARPers for years as milsurp might not have actually been surplus...
So, literally nothing. That's small guys getting slapped for breaking rules. Wake me when France imprisons some Thales executives for selling thermal scopes to Russia (post-invasion!)
By the way, the French government is the largest Thales shareholder.
These aren't cheap devices. Somebody with a Russian name dropping $100k on a some 20 NODs is going to raise eyebrows.
Right, one such operation failed, but there's many more which succeeded, not to mention all the Western stuff they confiscated from the Ukrainians (verified through videos they posted).
And you're right, it's not realistic for them to outfit thousands of soldiers with that gear, but certainly enough for small groups of special forces, but their real problem isn't bypassing sanctions, but their own corruption which made them not have such gear long before the war started in the first place.
I'll bite, how do you think the justice system should work?
Laws and their corresponding punishments are deterrents. And judges have flexibility in applying them to handle issues of accidental vs. intentional rule violation.
I don't know, and I am not saying we should turn the country into North Korea or China with full government control, that's far worse.
> And judges have flexibility in applying them
They can only apply them to those caught, and that's the problem here. Only a very small percentage of those violating the sanctions are actually caught at all in the first place.