Sanctions Fail: Russia Now Selling More Oil Now Than Before the War

The BRICS coalition (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) continues to challenge the Western liberal order as American geopolitical predominance wanes, and it has achieved notable successes.

Among them is the very startling fact that, despite every effort by the United States to render Russia a global pariah as a means to apply economic pressure on the Putin regime, it’s now reported that Russia is selling more oil in 2023 than it was before the war, mainly to India and China.

Via Yahoo! Finance:

Russia has been able to navigate Western sanctions well enough to push oil exports above levels reached before its war on Ukraine — and new data suggests that Moscow has China and India to thank for that.

In the first quarter, Russia’s seaborne crude oil exports totaled 3.5 million barrels per day versus 3.35 million barrels in the year-ago quarter, the tail end of which saw the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

China and India now account for roughly 90% of Russia’s oil, with each country snapping up an average of 1.5 million barrels per day, according to commodities analytics firm Kpler.

Let’s assume for the moment that U.S. policymakers are genuinely concerned with maintaining America’s geopolitical position of dominance. (This is a hell of an assumption to make and perhaps an ill-advised one given all of the evidence available of their devastating impact on the American economy.)

But taking their good faith in service to the United States on faith, they miscalculated epically in 2022 when they slapped oil sanctions on Russia and cut it out of the SWIFT international payment system.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. All the sanctions succeeded in doing was forcing Russia to get more creative in its approach to conducting international business.

They also apparently grossly overestimated how much cachet the United States still enjoys on the international stage. The Deep State’s apparent calculation was that it could send its demented puppet out onto the stage to condemn Russia as irredeemably evil, recast him as a new-age Winston Churchill, spit out some tired clichés about Democracy™ and Our Values™, and that would be sufficient to rally any fence-sitters to the American cause in opposition to Russia.

“The gravity of the threat is why the response of the West has been so swift and so powerful and so unified, unprecedented, and overwhelming. Swift and punishing costs are the only things that are going to get Russia to change its course… As a result of these unprecedented sanctions, the ruble almost is immediately reduced to rubble…The [Russian] economy is on track to be cut in half in the coming years.,” Biden promised in March 2022.

All hat, no cattle, as the Texas idiom goes.