Why Russia is openly violating sanctions against North Korea

Besides directly challenging U.S. sanctions proposals, Putin has also ignored — or encouraged — Russian businesses when they violate existing sanctions on trade with North Korea. The Russian government has helped use the port of Nakhodka in eastern Siberia as a shipment point to North Korea, as this is part of Moscow’s stated strategy of expanding Russia’s trade relationship by a factor of 10 from 2010 to 2020.

Putin has facilitated these sanctions violations because he wants to ensure the loyalty of anti-Western nationalists in Russia’s security services and foreign policy establishment — factions that could undermine his power.

That is an approach that has been in place since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. After the 1991 Gulf War, anti-Western nationalists in Russia stridently opposed the international community’s near-complete embargo against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. These nationalists pressured Russian policymakers to violate U.S.-led embargoes against other Kremlin-aligned countries such as Yugoslavia and Iran.