Should have been suspended long ago given most of the grain going out was NOT going to poor nations that needed the grain, it was going to the rich greedy European nations who had placed sanctions on Russia....
This is interesting...
The semiconductor shortage is now officially morphed into a semiconductor glut!
The attempt to stymie the flow of advanced chips into Russia was already a desperate and hopeless endeavor to begin with, but falling semiconductor prices mean that anybody willing to sell to Russia through intermediaries will be able to earn a premium while their competitors face unsold stock.
Here’s an earlier article from Politico for reference:
But some American national security veterans disagree with the optimistic assessment from U.S. President Joe Biden’s team. They say Western governments have little ability to stop other regimes — particularly China — from transferring microchips to Russia.
The controls on chips “are about as tight as a screen door,” said Matthew Turpin, the U.S. National Security Council director for China from 2018 to 2019. “China and Russia share a 4,300-kilometer border. There is absolutely no way we could detect if those chips are passed from China to Russia.”
The U.S. Commerce Department has repeatedly said it has seen no evidence that China is transferring technologies to Russia, which could open Beijing to severe sanctions. But the Chinese government has also said it would put no new limits on its commercial relationship with Russia, and Turpin and others say there is almost no way Western governments can be certain of their behavior.
Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees tech sanctions, has “fewer than 10 ‘inspectors’ in China which are supposed to determine whether chips have been diverted to Chinese military use,” Turpin said, adding that “we are not effective in inspections” because the Chinese government requires prior warning.
....
Frankly, any hope that the West had of preventing Russia from obtaining semiconductors just went out the window... er... screen door.