U.S. Treasury Announces Unprecedented and Expansive Sanctions Against Russia
home.treasury.gov
home.treasury.gov
It's funny seeing "swift" in so many of these headlines, I think it's a subconscious reference to what people are really thinking about.
Some context, one of the stiffest penalties on the table for Russia is remove them from the SWIFT [0]. As I understand things this is up to western Europe is still being decided.
And without SWIFT the sanctions are useless. Now only mass strikes in the Ukraine can bring down the new soon to be selected leaders.
Or giving every Ukrainian a gun. Which would eventually lead to an American-style society. Ukranians didn't opt for that.
Czechs have a 500 year old gun culture, and were quite well armed. It is a shall-issue country, and every gun permit is automatically a concealed carry permit. Today, close to 20-25% of the country own guns, probably more undeclared owners.
Nevertheless, it got occupied by Germany and by Russia on two separate occasions, and at some point "elected" Hapsburgs.
The days of "God made Men. Smith&Wesson made them equal" are long past, and we are now well into the age of neo-feudalism.
Choose your suzerain carefully.
Dunno, Soviet Union was just fine without SWIFT, but crumbled due to low oil prices. I'm surprised it's not being worked on right now.
China and Russia are already working on a SWIFT replacement. All they need to do is not try and use their banks as weapons -- which they don't need to for obvious reasons -- and they're immediately in-line to replace US-centric banking.
"Debanking" in any form is a short-term play with long-term consequences. Were I running a government, I'd be wondering when the US is going to decide that we need a more "democratic" regime, and taking steps to enhance my country's fiscal autonomy as much as possible.
Belt-and-road is going strong in both Africa and South America. Nobody really trusts China as a partner at this time, but the Party[1] in the US has done a great job of convincing the world that Washington is less reliable than Beijing.
[1] The GOP and the Democrats function as a single-party state. Obama beat the war drums just as hard as Bush.
And let's not get started on BRI projects. People always forget they should look at the reasons why Africa is still poor today. They should check for IRS policy and its impact on politics. US and West have no interest in development in Africa. But, when China goes to Africa makes good roads, the US starts to have a problem. If the US is so altruistic, why don't they go to Africa and develop their continent? I think the US just wants them to be poor so, it can enjoy its hegemony forever.
I mean, yeah, that's like saying that water is wet. Every "humanitarian reasons" organization is a smoke screen for some kind of power play.
> I think the US just wants them to be poor so, it can enjoy its hegemony forever.
Nah, I think this is more stupidity than malice. The regime and its staff, in spite of all the travel and internships and all the rest, really are absolutely clueless about the way that the rest of the planet lives.
It can, however convince that your child's empty belly is caused by evil westerners, and the country needs to stand behind Dear Leader to fight against them.
It's not propaganda that the sanctions have deprived them of food. It's the real actuality.
Russia's economy is on the verge of complete cripplement though. It is basically an oil state and an oil state without customers will soon be in massive trouble.
I own a lot of property in Moscow, have lived there for years. These sanctions will devastate the Russian economy, they are truly hitting key pieces.
Sberbank and VTB are enough to have severe impact on the average citizen.
Most Russian consumer goods are foreign imports that were paid for in USD.
Today all banks in Moscow have been full of people trying to get their money out in not-rubles, Friday might get even worse.
Today however it is a slap on the wrists of the Elite. Having a wealthy background like yourself (owning lots of property and being married into the oligarchy) you're seeing the most severe consequences.
Real consequences for the elite would be freezing assets (bank accounts, re-possessing Russian owned London properties, etc.).
Terrifying, I’ve been working around the clock to evacuate my friends and their families from Ukraine. Even now many are very reluctant to leave, trying to convince themselves that the war will end as fast as it started. At least the western borders are mostly open now, I have multiple friends with kids who don’t have passports.
In Russia? Fuck knows, nobody I know well would be there this time of the year. Russian friends in London and Europe have little faith in Putin being able to keep this up, even if most of these people were in favour of the annexation of Crimea.
My telegram is getting spammed with lots of pictures of increasingly large protests in big cities, hopefully they will continue growing.
> Why do you think Putin is doing this?
Nobody knows. My wife is the daughter of a Russian oligarch likely to be sanctioned soon, nobody in our circles has any idea why this is happening. Nobody believed there would be a war until the moment it started, most have purchased other passports and many are planning to get rid of their russian citizenships.
I emptied my Kiev apartment wednesday and had everything transferred to Romania, most of my friends were laughing about me being paranoid. They’re not laughing anymore.
Putin launches a few nukes at highly democratic cities like LA and NYC; Trump retaliates and takes out whatever area of Russia has the highest population of opposition for Putin; Trump brokers a “deal” and is a hero, and both guys have less trouble moving forward.
So if you've ever wonder why we let SA get away with <terrible deed>. This right here is the reason.
Politics is a dirty business.
USA can roughly export 3000kbd oil. It already exports 2.5-3.0mn daily during any given month. It does not have massively more export capacity than that.
USA SPR is large (600mn) but has very limited ability to get that oil into even the domestic market. The internal infrastructure is already occupied by moving the oil now that was released during the late 2021 SPR release. There is only perhaps 150kbd incremental oil it can put on to the market.
Heh, maybe today was a Putin move to further destroy US politics. Here comes Trump 2024? He'd refuse NATO deployment and the Baltic states or more could be Russian by mid 2025...