How your favorite fish sticks might be funding Russia's war

🎙️ The Speakers & Context

• The Format: Host-led discussion with embedded expert interviews and reporting.
• The Key Players:
  • Hosts: Waylon Wong (Planet Money, NPR) and Nate Hedgey (Outside In, public radio)—investigative journalists blending economics, environment, and geopolitics.
  • Experts: Jessica Gephardt (University of Washington assistant professor, seafood trade specialist; authored pre-war study on Russian fish inflows); Linda Bankins (Alaska fisherman, representing domestic industry impacts).
• The Vibe: Investigative and cautionary—exposing loopholes with a skeptical edge on policy enforcement.

🎣 The Executive Hook

• The "One Big Idea": Russia circumvents Western seafood bans by routing catches through Chinese processing plants, leveraging "substantial transformation" rules to relabel origins and flood markets, generating record revenues ($6B+ pre-war exports, banner 2023-2025) that fund the Ukraine war while undercutting U.S. fishermen via low-cost dumping. This exposes how global supply chains enable sanction evasion through minimal processing tweaks.
• Why It Matters: In a fragmented sanctions regime amid escalating U.S.-China tensions, it signals supply chain opacity as a core vulnerability—importers face regulatory whiplash, domestic industries lose pricing power, and capital flows indirectly bolster adversaries, mi