So, how are those Biden sanctions working out? You know, the toughest sanctions since, well, ever, by which we – collaborating closely with our European allies – were were going to crush Russia over Putin’s aggression.
Not so great.
Bloomberg (via Yahoo) reports that, after Russia invaded Ukraine this week, the immediate response by European energy companies was to increase natural gas purchases from Russia, much of it shipped through pipeline networks that pass through Ukraine.
You may remember that President Biden excluded oil and gas from the amazingly, unprecedentedly severe sanctions he announced on Thursday (along with declining to exclude Russia from the SWIFT system for financial transactions –because the amazingly, unprecedentedly severe sanctions he otherwise ordered made a cutoff from SWIFT unnecessary, or so he said).
While Europe saber-rattles about stopping or at least curtailing energy purchases from Russia, it gets 40 percent of its gas and a quarter of its oil from energy conglomerates controlled by Vladimir Putin’s regime. This provides the Kremlin with billions in revenues – which is how Putin is underwriting his aggression in Eastern Europe. Russia has manipulated the prices upward by curbing supplies and failing to fill storage sites in Europe before the winter heating season.
As the Bloomberg report notes, “Cutting off those supplies would cause gas prices to skyrocket and threaten power cuts, an unpalatable prospect for governments that are already grappling with the contribution of higher energy prices to surging inflation.”
As Rich and I discussed in recording our TMR podcast Friday, sanctions are a losing defensive strategy if they are not combined with a symmetrical offensive strategy: the abandonment of the woke-progressive Green New Dealism that has seized Biden and Democrats. If we fail to ramp up fossil-fuel production (which we could readily do if government released the shackles), Europe will continue to have no viable alternative to energy-dependence on Moscow.
Moreover, Americans, whose prices at the pump are skyrocketing because of Biden’s policies, will continue to rely on Putin’s monstrous regime for 7 percent of our crude oil imports. On that account, we are already paying Russia well over $1 billion per month, and if the price of oil, now high at $94 per barrel, soars above $100 (as it did briefly on this week, and as many experts predict it will in short order), we will be providing Putin over $2 billion a month to conduct his war of aggression.