ROTTERDAM, Netherlands – Jolanda Wielenga was checking documents on containers bound for Russia when her heart skipped a beat: one of them had a substance that could be used to make a chemical weapon.
The substance could be used for both civilian and military purposes. Exporting to Russia would have been legal before the invasion of Ukraine. But the EU sanctions imposed on Russia in recent months had changed that.
Mrs. Wielenga, an experienced customs investigator of two decades in the largest port in Europe, blocked the shipment.
“I slept pretty well that night,” she said one recent morning as she paced the terminal where hundreds of colorful freight containers, many bound for Russia, were piled up for detailed manual inspection.
Hers may have been a small win that showed the commitment and challenges of actually enforcing the toughest sanctions the European Union has imposed on each country. Europe’s measures are now estimated at 40 billion euros, about 40.7 billion dollars. They ban everything from high-tech goods to vodka from entering or leaving Russia, and include: a drastic ban on the import of Russian oil†
The practical difficulties of implementing these sanctions, especially the oil ban, are enormous and are left entirely to the European national governments and their authorities, as the European Union itself has no federal law enforcement capacity.
So the practical oversight of sanctions takes place in the sprawling terminals of Rotterdam and smaller ports across Europe, and it is a hugely complex, labor-intensive task that, officials admit, is far from perfect.
“Let’s be clear: it won’t be easy. But we just have to work on it,” Ursula von der Leyen, the bloc’s executive chairman, said last month as it passed the oil ban.
Even before the sanctions against Russia, Rotterdam fell short in its massive efforts to block illegal activities, such as a massive cocaine trade. Last year, the port intercepted some EUR 5 billion worth of drugs, but the EU police station, Europol, said that Rotterdam and its Belgian neighbour, Antwerp, remained the largest gateways for cocaine to Europe.
Understanding the war between Russia and Ukraine better
For the people working in Rotterdam, any EU sanctions package means more and more burdens to be met a united European stance against Russia falls on them.
The port is one of the busiest, largest and most automated in the world.
Twice the length of Manhattan and stretched over an area of 17,000 football fields, Rotterdam’s port facilities take at least 45 minutes to drive down at medium speed, or more than two hours of leisurely sailing.
It is also the largest entry and exit point for Europe’s $300 billion a year trade with Russia, which is now being reversed at record speed.
According to the port’s own data, 58 million tons of goods were imported from Russia and four million were exported in 2020; the combined value of traffic in both directions was approximately €34 billion.
“If we had 100 percent sanctions and no trade flow was allowed, that would be easiest!” So says the director of the port, Allard Castelein. In late February, when European leaders decided on their first two rounds of sanctions, he transformed his Covid-era task force into a Ukrainian war task force to deal with immense pressure on the port and its personnel.
Jan Kamp, the customs director of Rotterdam, remembers the weeks after February 24, when the Russian invasion began, as the most intense period of his decades-long career with Dutch customs.
“That first weekend, when the first regulations came into effect, we didn’t want to take the risk that a container with certain goods that were not allowed to go to Russia would end up in Russia,” said Mr. Kamp. “So we blocked a large number of containers at the time, about six or seven thousand. They had to be stopped, we would investigate first,” he added.
The number of backlog containers languishing in Rotterdam has now dropped to around 100 pending detailed inspection – not enough to slow the hum of this highly automated port, where human hands are rarely required to touch a container.
Mr Kamp had strengthened his staff in previous years following Britain’s departure from the European Union, and built up a team of 850, leaving him relatively well equipped to deal with this new crisis.
“We have overtime, extra people from other regions of the country, and dozens of people have been working on the sanctions,” he said in an interview.
But just extra pairs of hands are not enough.
Christopher Swift, a former U.S. Treasury official and a national security attorney at Foley & Lardner, was critical of Europe’s enforcement measures.
“The European Union does not invest as much in enforcement measures” as the United States, he said. “It is handled by national government agencies – some are more interested in helping Ukraine than others.”
“Enforcement resources are scarce and sometimes not well targeted,” he added.
Ms. Wielenga, who discovered the shipment containing the suspected chemical agent on its way to Russia, is specially trained to apply sanctions and has years of experience in this type of work.
The most difficult category of sanctions to deal with as a customs officer, and in which Mrs. Wielenga specializes, are those for so-called dual-use goods: items destined for export to Russia and which can have both civilian and military purposes.
These can range from boots to small feathers. Boots can be for walking, feathers for making toys. It is Mrs. Wielenga’s job to examine them, often with the help of labs, to find out if they are really intended to be used in combat or to make weapons.
But as officials worry about complicated detective work to apply sanctions against Russia-bound goods, the oil embargo becomes a whole new ball game.
Ultimately, they warn, it won’t be possible to apply it in a perfect or total way.
The embargo gives EU countries until the end of this year to phase out Russian oil imports, with minor exceptions.
The role of Rotterdam in the transport of Russian fuels is unique. It is the gateway to about a third of Russia’s crude oil (soon to be completely banned), a quarter of liquefied gas (not banned) and coal (banned), and a fifth of refined oil products (banned).
The EU sanctions stipulate that coal imports will be banned completely at the beginning of August. This was an easier measure for member states to agree on, even though they depend on Russia for about 45 percent of the coal they import.
Oil is more complicated because it can be reshipped, blended, refined, or relabeled to hide its Russian origin.
Of the five oil companies operating in Rotterdam, three have refineries in the port and, partly for reputation reasons, have pledged to stop the use of Russian oil before the embargo was agreed at EU level at the end of May.
“You cannot continuously monitor or control the volumes of crude oil traded, which can pass through 50 pairs of properties before reaching a final destination,” said Mr Castelein, the port’s director.
“It can go from one ship to another, from one port to another, from one region to another and eventually it will be processed somewhere and come back as a product somewhere else,” he added.
Independent experts say he’s right. Due to the fungible nature of crude oil, the role of Rotterdam as a pivot in the trade of Russian oil in Europe remains a challenge in terms of the application of this embargo.
It is not forbidden to mix Russian oil with crude oil from other countries and then relabel it. This spring, a new mixture with Russian oil and the brand “Latvian blend” suddenly appeared.
Shell was heavily criticized in the spring for buying blends containing up to 49.99 percent Russian oil. The company later apologized and said it would stop buying blends with Russian content†
But sellers have other solutions besides blends. Refining Russian oil in another country and relabeling the origin is also not prohibited. Shell CEO, Ben van Beurden, warned against… the difficulties of locating oil in May, when he announced the company’s outrageous quarterly profit, noting, “Diesel coming from an Indian refinery fed with Russian crude is considered Indian diesel.”
Russian oil banned from Europe can also change hands in the middle of the ocean: Ship-to-ship transfers of oil, performed by tankers coming close and emptying the contents from one to the other, can take place on high seas, where sanctions and other national laws do not apply.
“I really hope we realize that such sanctions may not be as effective as we would hope because energy tends to flow to the lowest pressure point,” said Mr Castelein.
Patricia Cohen contributed reporting from London.