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SANCTIONS FROM THE SKIES: 76 RUSSIAN SHIPS IN 6 DAYS — UKRAINE HAS BECOME THE ENFORCER THE WEST REFUSED TO BE. Eighteen sanctions packages could not stop the shadow fleet. Ukrainian drones stopped it in six days. Russia has now CLOSED the Kerch Strait and the Don-Azov Canal to its own shipping. A country without a navy has shut Russia’s own sea. This is not naval warfare. This is law enforcement by drone — and every capital in the world is taking notes. Full analysis below

SANCTIONS FROM THE SKIES: UKRAINE HAS BECOME THE ENFORCER THE WEST REFUSED TO BE

Seventy-six.

When I wrote to you yesterday, Ukrainian drones had struck 36 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov in 96 hours. By the end of the fifth day, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces put the tally at 48. Then came last night: 21 tankers struck in a single night — plus four tugs, two dry cargo ships and a dredger pressed into war logistics. Twenty-eight vessels in one night. Roughly seventy-six in six days.

The largest campaign against Russia’s shadow fleet in the entire war — and look at the curve. Two ships the first night. Ten the next. Nine. Fourteen. Eighteen. Now twenty-eight. This is not a raid. This is an industrial process, and it is compounding.

But if you think the number is the story, you have missed the story entirely.

What is happening in the Sea of Azov this week is not naval warfare in any classical sense. Ukraine has no navy to speak of. What is happening is something far more consequential: law enforcement by drone. And it exposes the greatest fiction of the last four years.

THE DEAD LETTER

Cast your mind back. The G7 price cap. The sanctions packages — eighteen of them from Brussels and counting. The solemn communiqués promising to strangle Russia’s oil revenue, the lifeblood of Putin’s war machine.

And what happened? A ghost armada of aging tankers, sailing under flags of convenience, with opaque ownership and phantom insurers, made a mockery of it all. Russian oil flowed. The money flowed. The missiles that money bought flowed into Ukrainian cities.

The rules existed. The will to enforce them did not.

Readers of The Great Game will recognise this immediately. It is the Legitimacy Principle in miniature: a rules-based order that cannot enforce its own rules has already ceased to exist. The sanctions regime was not weakened by the shadow fleet. It was revealed by it — revealed as paper.

UKRAINE STEPS INTO THE VACUUM

Now look at what Ukraine has done.

The tankers Ukraine has identified in these strikes were already sanctioned vessels — ships the West itself had blacklisted, named, and then watched sail on regardless. Ukraine is not making new law in the Sea of Azov. It is enforcing existing law that the West wrote, signed, and then declined to uphold.

Kyiv has gone further. In a formal letter to the International Maritime Organization, Ukraine’s government argued that vessels serving Russia’s war logistics cannot be regarded as ordinary commercial shipping — and may constitute legitimate military targets. Where the West left a blank page, Ukraine is writing doctrine, and filing it with the world’s maritime authority.

Think about what this means. OFAC could not stop these ships. Brussels could not stop these ships. Lloyd’s of London could not stop these ships. Drones assembled in Ukrainian workshops stopped them in six days.

Legitimacy does not flow to those who write rules. It flows to those who act.

CRIMEA IS SUFFOCATING

And the strategy beneath the principle is devastating.

Follow the sequence. Ukrainian strikes on Crimea’s oil facilities forced fuel rationing on the peninsula as early as late May. The land corridor from Russia came under sustained fire. That left one artery: the sea route across the Azov, from Taganrog to the occupied peninsula.

That artery is now closed.

Not metaphorically. Russia has suspended commercial navigation through the Kerch Strait and the Don-Azov Canal — the Border Guard Service has simply stopped accepting passage applications. And the wound is bleeding beyond Crimea: the Azov carries up to a quarter of Russia’s wheat exports, and wheat futures on Euronext leapt nearly 4% to a six-week high within hours. Ukraine did not just close Russia’s supply line to Crimea. It closed Russia’s own sea.

The tell is in the details: several tankers were struck twice in the same week. Twice! Russia is sending the same battered ships down the same gauntlet because it has no other route. Moscow has even resorted to disguising fuel shipments as milk and water tankers — the logistics of a power in desperation, not a power in control.

Those who read my analysis of the Crimea logistics collapse will understand: this is that thesis entering its terminal phase. A rear base that cannot be fuelled is not a rear base. It is a hostage.

THE PRECEDENT

Here is the lesson the world’s capitals are absorbing tonight, whether they admit it or not:

In the post-rules order, sanctions are only as real as the actor willing to enforce them kinetically. Paper regimes deter no one. Enforcement is legitimacy.

Ukraine — outgunned, outspent, written off a hundred times — has just demonstrated what enforcement looks like. Not with a blue-water navy. Not with a carrier group. With will, ingenuity, and machines that cost less than the cargo they destroy.

The question that should keep strategists awake is not what happens to the next Russian tanker in the Azov.

It is: who learns this lesson next — and in which strait?

The Great Game continues.

Bryce Covert at The Nation:

M, the mother of two young children living in Tucson, Arizona, works full-time but has been relying on about $700 a month in food stamps to make sure her children are fed ever since they were born. Keeping access to the benefit requires recertifying her income and eligibility every six months, so last August she got her paperwork ready for the renewal process. She sent her documents every way possibly except for by fax—online, through e-mail, through the mail, and in person at an office—to make sure her family stayed enrolled. But then M—The Nation is referring to her by an initial to protect her from a past abusive partner—received a letter from the Arizona Department of Economic Security saying she hadn’t included some of the required documents, even though she had sent in what was typically sufficient: her pay stubs, her rental agreement, the rates for her children’s childcare. “I was quite surprised,” she said. In March, she tried again, reapplying for food stamps. This time, after she turned in the paperwork, the state requested documentation from a job “that I’ve never heard of,” but that the state claimed she is doing on top of her actual job, which put her income above the eligibility threshold. When M went to a state office to report that she doesn’t work for that company, she was told to file an identity-theft report.

So she took time off work to not only submit paperwork to the Social Security office but to file both a police and an FBI report. Despite sending in what she was told was necessary to fix the problem, she hasn’t received a response from the state. When she calls for an update, she can’t get through to anyone. “There’s not a lot of employees that can assist you,” she said. The people working at the offices tell her she to just keep calling. “I feel like it’s very disorganized.”

In the meantime, her family hasn’t gotten any support through the food stamp program, leaving her trying to make ends meet on her income of $18 an hour. It “has been really, really hard, because I have to manage my whole life around my paycheck,” she said. She’s cut down on her own meals to give her kids more to eat. She feels constantly torn between getting them healthy food and the cheaper food she can buy more of. “They’re very smart and they have noticed. They’re like, ‘You know mom, we used to get strawberries and blueberries and raspberries,’” she said. She often tells them “no” when they request food items at the grocery store. “It’s hard as a parent because you do want to give them everything but it’s also like, OK. those five dollars are going to be toward diapers or gas or rent.”

[...] M is one of millions of Americans who have lost food stamps since last summer. Republicans passed HR1 last July, or the One Big Beautiful Bill, entirely along party lines, enacting the largest cut to food stamps, also known as the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, in history. The legislation reduced SNAP by about $187 billion over the following decade.

The bill achieved that cut through a number of changes. It tightened the program’s existing work requirement by applying it to people up to age 65 and to parents with children 14 and older. It also narrowed exemptions for veterans, homeless people, and former foster youth, and barred undocumented immigrants. Starting next year, states will have to cover 75 percent of the program’s administrative costs, instead of the 50 percent they have been covering. If states are found to have high payment-error rates—meaning they underpaid or overpaid too many recipients—they’ll have to chip in even more to cover the actual SNAP benefits, too.

Since the bill was enacted, more than 4 million people have fallen off of SNAP’s rolls, a 10 percent decline. That includes more than 800,000 children—and that is only from the 13 states with available data. While the number of people enrolled in SNAP had been declining before HR1 went into effect last July, the trend has “accelerated significantly in the months after that,” said Joseph Llobrera, senior director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The reductions have occurred in every state across the country, and participation has dropped by 10 percent or more in 21 states. But some have seen even more significant drops. Arizona is so far the worst: Half of all people who had been enrolled are now going without food stamps.

[...] HR1 already added more administrative burdens to the program, requiring states to verify immigration status and compliance with the work requirement. They have received no extra funding to increase administrative staffing, and many agencies, including Arizona’s, were already understaffed. Last summer, Arizona cut department staff by 5 percent. “It creates this mountain of paperwork that state agencies have to act on,” Llobrera said. Staff simply may not be able to review all of it in time. That can sometimes mean that, even when someone has submitted everything required of them, their case gets closed before someone even reviews their application.

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Dead-dead from the beginning.