Anti-Russian sanctions: A bane for the West

The mandated “green” globalist agendas such as Build Back Better are prioritized over sanctions and undermine the populations’ most basic needs.

On Wednesday, March 30, Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the Russian State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, on his Telegram channel proposed tougher retaliation for Western sanctions against Russia. “It would be right to expand the list of goods that can only be exported for rubles where it is beneficial to our country: fertilizers, cereals, vegetable oil, crude oil, coal, metals, wood, etc.,” wrote Volodin.

Moscow has previously stated that all hostile countries would only be allowed to buy Russian energy if they pay in rubles. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in the last week of March that the new gas payment system would take time to implement, despite a deadline set by President Vladimir Putin to March 31. Friendly countries are allowed to pay with whatever currency they want, based on what was agreed upon.

There are some 50 hostile countries and the remaining ones – about three quarters of all countries in the world – are considered by Moscow as friendly countries. Several representatives of the West’s establishment, such as French President Emanuel Macron, have declared that they would not pay in rubles, which essentially means an export ban with serious consequences for the West.

On April 1, Britain’s Telegraph reported that Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian prime minister and president, had announced that Russia would not only demand food and energy in rubles from unfriendly countries, but would no longer supply food. The Telegraph quoted Medvedev without adding which countries were being affected.

On Thursday, March 24, US President Joe Biden gave a press conference in Belgium after Biden participated in meetings with NATO and G7 leaders. The doddering American president acknowledged that global food shortages were coming. He pointed out that Russia and Ukraine were Europe’s granaries.

“It’s going to be real,” Biden said in Brussels. “The price of the sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.”

Ukraine has historically been called Europe’s barley table because of its extremely fertile soil. Before the war started, Russia and Ukraine together accounted for almost a third of all wheat exported globally, a fifth of all maize and 80 percent of sunflower oil.

And even though Biden fully understands that food shortages are imminent, he still took no significant action to counter the impending disaster. On the contrary, when American farmers earlier this year, among other things, asked not to be forced to sell their crops for biofuel (for example ethanol), they were ignored. Millions of tonnes of grain, potential food for large numbers of people, would instead continue to be used to combat the alleged threat of carbon dioxide emissions.

Global sanctions devastating for the West

Biden then went on to explain what the consequences of the sanctions against Russia, as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine, would be a bane for Europe as well as the rest of the world.

Many observers found Biden’s statement most curious. There are however facts that the mainstream media does not want to report on: The Russian economy has a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of $ 1 648 billion (IMF 2021). By comparison, the United States has a GDP of $ 22 940 billion (IMF 2021), i.e. about 14 times larger.

The state of California’s GDP of $ 3 357 billion (FRED 2020) is more than double that of Russia, the world’s largest nation in terms of area. If we compare the Russian economy with both the US and the EU, whose GDP is $ 17 078 billion (IMF 2021), the Russian economy corresponds to only 4,1 percent of the US and the EU. And it should be noted that the EU does not include countries such as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Australia and Canada to name a few.

What is the real logic behind sanctions?

According to the President of the United States, if sanctions, designed by the West’s establishment and encouraged by its media, impose such a terrible cost, several questions arise. One of these is that if Russia’s economy is not even a quarter of the US and EU economies, why impose sanctions that in practice affect the world economy and thus hit the creators of these sanctions harder?

Tucker Carlsson, Fox News host, pointed out that the most important task for any government was to ensure food, water and energy for its people and that China, for example, was working hard to do so. Carlson then underscored that the globalist agenda of Build Back Better, which Biden and the West’s leaders cherish, was exactly the opposite.

It gets even worse when we consider that the net exporter Russia is the world’s only full-spectrum superpower in terms of raw materials, while the West’s economies today are mostly service economies.

If world trade is slowed down and stopped, as has happened with two years of Corona restrictions and now counter-productive sanctions against Russia, it would mainly harm countries that rely on importing raw materials. These, of course, are found in the West, which is now seeing its production capacity weaken and even implode due to commodity and energy shortages.

Energy prices in the West are starting to paralyze countries, where rampant inflation, not least in food prices, is making it increasingly difficult for people to cope with everyday life. At the same time, commodity prices in Russia are falling, as there is now a surplus of food and energy, including fuel. A liter of diesel costs around 50 rubles at the gas station.

The only logical conclusion is that sanctions are merely a pretext and actually directed at humanity in general and the peoples of the West in particular.