5 ms·

US anti-Russia sanctions killed my business

25 points by behindai 5y ago

I am not a Russian citizen, but I had my IT projects aimed at Russian speakers. Yesterday I've noticed that Stripe declines all transactions from cards issued in Russian Federation and Belarus. My business has been killed.

kstenerud 5y ago
And that really sucks. You have my sympathy. However, these sanctions are being enacted to stop more PEOPLE from being killed. Dead businesses are unfortunate, but acceptable collateral damage compared to human life.
- behindai 5y ago
  I don't understand how my dead business can help to stop more PEOPLE from being killed.
  - kstenerud 5y ago
    Your dead business isn't helping stop people from being killed. It's collateral damage from the sactions, but those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness. I realize that this is cold comfort as the business you've put so much work into has now died for reasons outside of your control, and that's a really shitty situation to find yourself in. This is a black swan event. Your business acumen is not in doubt. You have no fault in this.
    - WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
      > those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness It's this part that seems not very well supported. From what I can tell, Russia thought about the probable sanctions quite a lot before starting this course of action, so it's not clear to me that sanctions are going to have much effect. Even if sanctions generally were accomplishing something, it's not clear to me that these particular sanctions are doing anything useful. It kind of seems like more Great Reset stuff, i.e., claim that something useful is being done while being incredibly disruptive in ways that destroy small businesses.
    - crate_barre 5y ago
      I do feel like sanctions should better target large institutions. So you won’t cut off Gazprom but you’ll stop some average citizen from running their business, or in the case of Namecheap, stop them from registering a domain name? It’s like, we just don’t get it.
      - kstenerud 5y ago
        In ideal conditions we could do that, but the world is messy. There are many competing forces that need to be balanced, and it almost always can't be done without some blowback or collateral damage or compromise. So we take a pragmatic approach based on our best information at the time, and as quickly as possible. How do you stop a dictator with the world's largest arsenal of nukes from engaging in a 19th century style land grab without destroying the world political order, world economies, and perhaps even the world itself? Now how do you do it without creating a power vacuum? It's easy to stand back observing the results and criticize in hindsight (and believe me, we'll get plenty of that in a few months), but right now people need to make quick and possibly inefficient decisions using whatever information they can gather because the consequences are so grave.
        mbg721 5y ago
        That sounds like it could also have been written to justify Japanese internment in WWII. Maybe hindsight buys us some luxuries we couldn't otherwise afford, but it's worth some hard thinking about what is really necessary.
        kstenerud 5y ago
        If we want to go down that road to its logical conclusion, anything could be written to justify anything. But such argumentation is fruitless.
        native_samples 5y ago
        If sanctions worked really well, that position could be justifiable. In practice, sanctions rarely if ever seem to cause violent revolution. They just end up hurting the little guys who can't do anything anyway, whilst the most well connected work around them anyway. See how North Korea has Apple computers ... for the leadership.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      >It's collateral damage from the sanctions, but those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness. We can hope that this is the case, but we certainly don't know. We don't have knowledge of the future or alternative timelines. It is entirely possible that they are making the situation worse, the conflict more intense, or could lead to future Wars or nuclear annihilation. This is the gamble that we are taking, perhaps a calculated gamble but a gamble nonetheless. Anyone who says that they know for a fact what will happen is a liar
    - xyzzy21 5y ago
      Has as much proof as that lockdowns and masks help.
- tsol 5y ago
  That's the hope, but it also feels a lot like Germany after WWI. Sometimes cutting countries off from your sphere of influence and being overly harsh just ends up radicalizing people more. It's strange to me how little discussion this seems to warrant from people.
  - witrak 5y ago
    Strange: reading your comment I expected after the first line that you try to remind us of the annexation by Germany of part Czechoslovakia BEFORE WWII.
- hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
  Not really. Sending sanctions towards ordinary Russians and sending javelins/stingers to Ukraine will only give you the following outcome: 1 - People who hates Putin regime still hates them, maybe a bit more, not much to gain here; 2 - People who likes Putin will hate you, again not much to lose here; 3 - People in the middle might hate Putin, but will definitely hate you more because you DIRECTLY hit them; 4 - Sending javelins/stingers to Ukraine will NOT stop Russian troops, but only to inflict more damage to them and at the same time make siege much more bloodier. It will just prolong the conflict with net lose on ordinary Ukraine citizen's side. Ukraine is still going to lose (and at the same time lost more human lives) anyway. The fantasy of "ordinary citizen taking urban guerilla warfare and driving enemies out" only works in games, unfortunately. 5 - If western countries REALLY want to minimize the damage to ordinary citizens, there are two feasible ways, one is to send in peace keeping troops including Air force and play a strong face to Putin. To avoid conflict with advancing Russian army a no-fly zone can be setup in Western Ukraine to accept refugees. The second way is to push the Ukraine army to let ordinary people to flee, not to keep them in the city.
  - witrak 5y ago
    I can't interpret your statements as anything else than oversimplified (almost to a primitive level) criticism of the attempt of civilized countries to stop a barbaric attack being openly continuation of earlier attack not treated appropriately when it was the proper time for it.
    - hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
      It is not really an attempt to stop the attack, but to prolong it (mostly regarding the stingers/javelins not the sactions), sadly. The only way to stop it is to send in troops to the western part before Russia grabs them.
      - behindai 5y ago
        And start a WW3
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zelon88 5y ago
I'm sorry to hear this. When I worked in manufacturing environments, especially defense related ones, we had policies in place to ensure the reliability of our supply chain, but we didn't have anything in place to verify the reliability of our clients (other than credit, obviously). For example, we would verify the country of origin for purchased materials, but we never tracked where the final products wound up. It is an interesting problem for sure. At least you can be flattered knowing that your work is being used as incentive; a weapon... and that it's working.
jleyank 5y ago
Political gamble. Like all gambles they can pay big or not. It’s not like the world situation for the last 5-10 years makes Ukraine a surprise. If you want to minimize risk, don’t buy junk bonds…
djohnston 5y ago
Putin killed your business, and I'm sympathetic to that and it sucks for you that your business has become a casualty of economic warfare.
warrenm 5y ago
I, as I am sure is most of HN, is saddened to hear of your loss However, as others have pointed-out, this isn't about YOU - this is about a nation-state unilaterally deciding that it should attempt to DESTROY a neighbor for the sake of a few natural resources and a slightly larger buffer between it and other [what its leader thinks are] "enemy"/"hostile" nations
- tsol 5y ago
  >this is about a nation-state unilaterally deciding that it should attempt to DESTROY a neighbor for the sake of a few natural resources When did this become about America? /s I find it funny, as a Muslim, to see how little discussion there is on this issue. As opposed to the middle east, where even drone strikes killing civilians are justified and made to seem like a very complicated issue with no simple solution. Everyone is equal, but some people are more equal than others it seems
jqpabc123 5y ago
International trade is risky. More so if you're trading with a rogue nation led by a criminal.
RedXIII 5y ago
Epiphany21 5y ago
Can you adapt the products to other languages/regions? It could go a long way towards diversifying your sources of income. The sanctions won't last forever anyways, meaning there's a good chance that investment could pay off in the end.
bananabiscuit 5y ago
- ladyattis 5y ago
  >You have my condolences for being a victim of all this ridiculous posturing and virtue signaling. It ain't virtue signaling when the Treasury Department blocks all transactions related to your business. So please stop with the alt-right bs talking points, we're in the prelude to a world war it's not time for getting mad at businesses who are literally not able to transact at all (Stripe is in the same boat here as many other firms due to the EO).
Justin_K 5y ago
That sucks but your target market just closed every business in Ukraine.
HelloNurse 5y ago
"Killing" your business (actually, at the end of the war your customers will be back; hopefully you can coast on without income and with reduced costs) is not only collateral damage but part of the sanctions: it hurts Russian citizens and businesses, and their friends.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I think this overly trivializes the posters situation without reason, but the end point is correct. Maybe the business is dead, maybe they will lose their home, and maybe their life's work. This will certainly happen to countless people. The point of Broad and durable sanctions is often too simply hurt the lives of citizens and pressure or weaken the government.
throwawayninja 5y ago
Would it be possible for you to contact your customers and agree on a credit system? No finances being moved (because of the war) but you'll keep a track of their charges and after the war settle up. This will be difficult on your side, but if you have access to a business loan will allow you to entirely withstand the sanctions at only a ~8-14% loss if the war lasts an entire year. ~1-2% if only a few months. Sad news, but in perspective this will always happen. It's one reason why businesses have so much interest in what their government is doing.
dogweather 5y ago
Pivot to Ukrainian speakers. Also, don't invest in non-democracies. You took a big gamble.
jdrc 5y ago
Russian speakers aren't just in russia
frozencell 5y ago
Sorry you are in an authoritative country (Internet). But it's the best we have found yet.
faangiq 5y ago
Dude just build your own internet.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

25 points by behindai 5y ago

kstenerud 5y ago

And that really sucks. You have my sympathy. However, these sanctions are being enacted to stop more PEOPLE from being killed. Dead businesses are unfortunate, but acceptable collateral damage compared to human life.

behindai 5y ago
I don't understand how my dead business can help to stop more PEOPLE from being killed.
- kstenerud 5y ago
  Your dead business isn't helping stop people from being killed. It's collateral damage from the sactions, but those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness. I realize that this is cold comfort as the business you've put so much work into has now died for reasons outside of your control, and that's a really shitty situation to find yourself in. This is a black swan event. Your business acumen is not in doubt. You have no fault in this.
  - WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
    > those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness It's this part that seems not very well supported. From what I can tell, Russia thought about the probable sanctions quite a lot before starting this course of action, so it's not clear to me that sanctions are going to have much effect. Even if sanctions generally were accomplishing something, it's not clear to me that these particular sanctions are doing anything useful. It kind of seems like more Great Reset stuff, i.e., claim that something useful is being done while being incredibly disruptive in ways that destroy small businesses.
  - crate_barre 5y ago
    I do feel like sanctions should better target large institutions. So you won’t cut off Gazprom but you’ll stop some average citizen from running their business, or in the case of Namecheap, stop them from registering a domain name? It’s like, we just don’t get it.
    - kstenerud 5y ago
      In ideal conditions we could do that, but the world is messy. There are many competing forces that need to be balanced, and it almost always can't be done without some blowback or collateral damage or compromise. So we take a pragmatic approach based on our best information at the time, and as quickly as possible. How do you stop a dictator with the world's largest arsenal of nukes from engaging in a 19th century style land grab without destroying the world political order, world economies, and perhaps even the world itself? Now how do you do it without creating a power vacuum? It's easy to stand back observing the results and criticize in hindsight (and believe me, we'll get plenty of that in a few months), but right now people need to make quick and possibly inefficient decisions using whatever information they can gather because the consequences are so grave.
      - mbg721 5y ago
        That sounds like it could also have been written to justify Japanese internment in WWII. Maybe hindsight buys us some luxuries we couldn't otherwise afford, but it's worth some hard thinking about what is really necessary.
        kstenerud 5y ago
        If we want to go down that road to its logical conclusion, anything could be written to justify anything. But such argumentation is fruitless.
      - native_samples 5y ago
        If sanctions worked really well, that position could be justifiable. In practice, sanctions rarely if ever seem to cause violent revolution. They just end up hurting the little guys who can't do anything anyway, whilst the most well connected work around them anyway. See how North Korea has Apple computers ... for the leadership.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    >It's collateral damage from the sanctions, but those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness. We can hope that this is the case, but we certainly don't know. We don't have knowledge of the future or alternative timelines. It is entirely possible that they are making the situation worse, the conflict more intense, or could lead to future Wars or nuclear annihilation. This is the gamble that we are taking, perhaps a calculated gamble but a gamble nonetheless. Anyone who says that they know for a fact what will happen is a liar
  - xyzzy21 5y ago
    Has as much proof as that lockdowns and masks help.
tsol 5y ago
That's the hope, but it also feels a lot like Germany after WWI. Sometimes cutting countries off from your sphere of influence and being overly harsh just ends up radicalizing people more. It's strange to me how little discussion this seems to warrant from people.
- witrak 5y ago
  Strange: reading your comment I expected after the first line that you try to remind us of the annexation by Germany of part Czechoslovakia BEFORE WWII.
hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
Not really. Sending sanctions towards ordinary Russians and sending javelins/stingers to Ukraine will only give you the following outcome: 1 - People who hates Putin regime still hates them, maybe a bit more, not much to gain here; 2 - People who likes Putin will hate you, again not much to lose here; 3 - People in the middle might hate Putin, but will definitely hate you more because you DIRECTLY hit them; 4 - Sending javelins/stingers to Ukraine will NOT stop Russian troops, but only to inflict more damage to them and at the same time make siege much more bloodier. It will just prolong the conflict with net lose on ordinary Ukraine citizen's side. Ukraine is still going to lose (and at the same time lost more human lives) anyway. The fantasy of "ordinary citizen taking urban guerilla warfare and driving enemies out" only works in games, unfortunately. 5 - If western countries REALLY want to minimize the damage to ordinary citizens, there are two feasible ways, one is to send in peace keeping troops including Air force and play a strong face to Putin. To avoid conflict with advancing Russian army a no-fly zone can be setup in Western Ukraine to accept refugees. The second way is to push the Ukraine army to let ordinary people to flee, not to keep them in the city.
- witrak 5y ago
  I can't interpret your statements as anything else than oversimplified (almost to a primitive level) criticism of the attempt of civilized countries to stop a barbaric attack being openly continuation of earlier attack not treated appropriately when it was the proper time for it.
  - hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
    It is not really an attempt to stop the attack, but to prolong it (mostly regarding the stingers/javelins not the sactions), sadly. The only way to stop it is to send in troops to the western part before Russia grabs them.
    - behindai 5y ago
      And start a WW3

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zelon88 5y ago

I'm sorry to hear this. When I worked in manufacturing environments, especially defense related ones, we had policies in place to ensure the reliability of our supply chain, but we didn't have anything in place to verify the reliability of our clients (other than credit, obviously). For example, we would verify the country of origin for purchased materials, but we never tracked where the final products wound up. It is an interesting problem for sure. At least you can be flattered knowing that your work is being used as incentive; a weapon... and that it's working.

jleyank 5y ago

Political gamble. Like all gambles they can pay big or not. It’s not like the world situation for the last 5-10 years makes Ukraine a surprise. If you want to minimize risk, don’t buy junk bonds…

djohnston 5y ago

Putin killed your business, and I'm sympathetic to that and it sucks for you that your business has become a casualty of economic warfare.

warrenm 5y ago

I, as I am sure is most of HN, is saddened to hear of your loss However, as others have pointed-out, this isn't about YOU - this is about a nation-state unilaterally deciding that it should attempt to DESTROY a neighbor for the sake of a few natural resources and a slightly larger buffer between it and other [what its leader thinks are] "enemy"/"hostile" nations

tsol 5y ago
>this is about a nation-state unilaterally deciding that it should attempt to DESTROY a neighbor for the sake of a few natural resources When did this become about America? /s I find it funny, as a Muslim, to see how little discussion there is on this issue. As opposed to the middle east, where even drone strikes killing civilians are justified and made to seem like a very complicated issue with no simple solution. Everyone is equal, but some people are more equal than others it seems

jqpabc123 5y ago

International trade is risky. More so if you're trading with a rogue nation led by a criminal.

RedXIII 5y ago

Epiphany21 5y ago

Can you adapt the products to other languages/regions? It could go a long way towards diversifying your sources of income. The sanctions won't last forever anyways, meaning there's a good chance that investment could pay off in the end.

bananabiscuit 5y ago

ladyattis 5y ago
>You have my condolences for being a victim of all this ridiculous posturing and virtue signaling. It ain't virtue signaling when the Treasury Department blocks all transactions related to your business. So please stop with the alt-right bs talking points, we're in the prelude to a world war it's not time for getting mad at businesses who are literally not able to transact at all (Stripe is in the same boat here as many other firms due to the EO).

Justin_K 5y ago

That sucks but your target market just closed every business in Ukraine.

HelloNurse 5y ago

"Killing" your business (actually, at the end of the war your customers will be back; hopefully you can coast on without income and with reduced costs) is not only collateral damage but part of the sanctions: it hurts Russian citizens and businesses, and their friends.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
I think this overly trivializes the posters situation without reason, but the end point is correct. Maybe the business is dead, maybe they will lose their home, and maybe their life's work. This will certainly happen to countless people. The point of Broad and durable sanctions is often too simply hurt the lives of citizens and pressure or weaken the government.

throwawayninja 5y ago

Would it be possible for you to contact your customers and agree on a credit system? No finances being moved (because of the war) but you'll keep a track of their charges and after the war settle up. This will be difficult on your side, but if you have access to a business loan will allow you to entirely withstand the sanctions at only a ~8-14% loss if the war lasts an entire year. ~1-2% if only a few months. Sad news, but in perspective this will always happen. It's one reason why businesses have so much interest in what their government is doing.

dogweather 5y ago

Pivot to Ukrainian speakers. Also, don't invest in non-democracies. You took a big gamble.

jdrc 5y ago

Russian speakers aren't just in russia

frozencell 5y ago

Sorry you are in an authoritative country (Internet). But it's the best we have found yet.

faangiq 5y ago

Dude just build your own internet.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]