Tag Archives: U.S. sanctions on Russia

Russia is winning the economic war – and Putin is no closer to withdrawing troops, by Larry Elliott

Posted on June 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

A mainstream media outlet comes to grips with the truth about Ukraine. From Larry Elliott at theguardian.com:

The perverse effects of sanctions means rising fuel and food costs for the rest of the world – and fears are growing of a humanitarian catastrophe. Sooner or later, a deal must be made

Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday.
‘The Kremlin thinks Russia’s threshold for economic pain is higher than the west’s, and it is probably right about that.’ Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday. Photograph: Mikhail Metzel/AP

It is now three months since the west launched its economic war against Russia, and it is not going according to plan. On the contrary, things are going very badly indeed.

Sanctions were imposed on Vladimir Putin not because they were considered the best option, but because they were better than the other two available courses of action: doing nothing or getting involved militarily.

The first set of economic measures were introduced immediately after the invasion, when it was assumed Ukraine would capitulate within days. That didn’t happen, with the result that sanctions – while still incomplete – have gradually been intensified.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Russia Sends Record Volumes Of Oil To India, China, by Tsvetana Paraskova

Posted on May 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. is just killing Russia with its sanctions. From Tsvetana Paraskova at oilprice.com:

  • India and China have stepped up purchases and are importing record volumes of Russian crude.
  • some Chinese state giants haven’t ramped up imports of spot cargoes from Russia despite steep discounts.
  • China registered in April its first annual increase in crude oil imports.

While Europe shuns Russian oil amid sanctions and expectations of an oil embargo on Russian oil imports, India and China have stepped up purchases and are importing record volumes of Russian crude, according to data from energy analytics company Kpler cited by Bloomberg on Friday.

Russia had up to 79 million barrels of crude either traveling on tankers or held in floating storage over the past week, Kpler’s estimates have shown. That’s more than double the 27 million barrels of crude Russia had seaborne in February, just before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Posted in Business, Economics, Economy, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Governments, War

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Is America the Real Victim of Anti-Russia Sanctions? By Arnaud Bertrand

Posted on May 27, 2022 | 1 comment

The West’s sanctions of Russia are going to go down in history as one of the great instances of geopolitically shooting yourself in the foot. From Arnaud Bertrand at tabletmag.com:

By misjudging the size and importance of Russia’s economy, the West might have taken steps toward its own isolation

Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Remember the claims that Russia’s economy was more or less irrelevant, merely the equivalent of a small, not very impressive European country? “Putin, who has an economy the size of Italy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea, “[is] playing a poker game with a pair of twos and winning.” Of increasing Russian diplomatic and geopolitical influence in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, The Economist asked in 2019, “How did a country with an economy the size of Spain … achieve all this?”

Seldom has the West so grossly misjudged an economy’s global significance. French economist Jacques Sapir, a renowned specialist of the Russian economy who teaches at the Moscow and Paris schools of economics, explained recently that the war in Ukraine has “made us realize that the Russian economy is considerably more important than what we thought.” For Sapir, one big reason for this miscalculation is exchange rates. If you compare Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) by simply converting it from rubles into U.S. dollars, you indeed get an economy the size of Spain’s. But such a comparison makes no sense without adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP), which accounts for productivity and standards of living, and thus per capita welfare and resource use. Indeed, PPP is the measure favored by most international institutions, from the IMF to the OECD. And when you measure Russia’s GDP based on PPP, it’s clear that Russia’s economy is actually more like the size of Germany’s, about $4.4 trillion for Russia versus $4.6 trillion for Germany. From the size of a small and somewhat ailing European economy to the biggest economy in Europe and one of the largest in the world—not a negligible difference.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Energy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military

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Nausea Rules, James Howard Kunstler

Posted on May 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

Build back better is just a euphemism for destroy everything. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

The way financial markets puked this week, they must have started reading the news. Let’s face it, the headlines are a little short of reassuring. The $6.49 price on a gallon of diesel is enough alone to tell you that the nation can’t do business the way it’s set up to do, and there isn’t a new model for running things ready to launch — not even Klaus Schwab’s utopia of robots and eunuchs.

What’s out there, rather, is a model of breakdown and collapse which the Woked-up, globalist neo-Jacobins are doing everything possible to hasten. US-inspired sanctions on Russia have quickly blown-up in America’s face. How’s that ban on Russian oil working? Do you understand that US shale oil — the bulk of our production — is exceptionally light in composition, meaning it contains not much of the heavier distillates like diesel and aviation fuel?  ‘Tis so, alas. Truckers just won’t truck at $6.49-a-gallon, and before long they’ll be out of business altogether, especially the independents who have whopping mortgages on their rigs that won’t be paid. The equation is tearfully simple: no trucks = no US economy.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Energy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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The Democrats’ New ‘Latino’ Problem: The Ghost of James Monroe, by Robert Oscar Lopez

Posted on March 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

Not one nation south of the U.S. supports the U.S. government’s sanctions on Russia. From Robert Oscar Lopez at americanthinker.com:

On social media, some disturbing maps have circulated showing the globe in terms of which nations have sanctioned Russia over her invasion of Ukraine.  Bolivian writer Ollie Vargas posted this map, which makes clear that sanctions in Russia are seen as an absolute must in Europe, the English-speaking world, Japan, and South Korea.  Everywhere else, President Biden’s requests for economic war against Russia have been rejected.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently claimed that we have “basically crushed” Russia’s economy through sanctions, but is this true?  The sanctions can’t work in crushing the Russian economy and forcing the ouster of Putin if only a small percentage of the globe is really sanctioning Moscow.  Despite how important the United States and her allies are, Russia still has a huge playing field in which to recover trade.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda

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