This is John Batcher, conversation with Max Meislish of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy about sanctions, sanctions detection, sanctions enforcement by the United States Treasury Department during the Russian conflict, the

conflict over the invasion of Ukraine and the threats to NATO. The severe sanctions

visited upon Russia need to be enforced. Max worked for the Office of Foreign

Asset Control, that is OFAC. We're talking about pursuing the black marketeers and the evaders such as the

shadow fleet of oil tankers that may or may not be at sea right now, such as those using third parties to ship sensitive

equipment into Russia from China, from the U.S., from Germany.

Oofek does the job.

What does it need? Max addresses directly.

Max Meislish, former Oofak, now at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, leading the investigation

of what the U.S. government sanctions regime needs, what's happening right now. The evasion of sanctions is not just limited to

Russia. There's also Iran or also bad actors across the landscape. It's all a

learning process. Here's Max. Thank you. Much more of this tonight.

Yeah, you know, it's a little bit of a trope in DC where I'm located to say that we need more resources, right, more funding to solve a problem.

But in this instance, you know, I used to work at OFAC in the licensing division and then later in the enforcement division.

And there is an under-resourced element to this, where you have too few people engaged

in actual designations, too few people engaged in the investigations of violations, and too few

people engaged in coordination across the interagency.

So much of my recommendation does come down to we need more personnel. We need to have more resources for the sanctions

administering bodies and as well we need to have more resources for advanced detection capabilities

so that we can actually identify evasion, particularly in the maritime domain where a lot of these ship-to-ship transfers occur.