Crisis in Ukraine: Without Sanctions That Have Real Teeth The World Is Facing a Very Dangerous Future
President Biden took to the podium and declared that the package of sanctions the United States has crafted in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine exceeds “anything that’s ever been done.” But that package of sanctions falls short of anything that will actually make a difference.
Biden and his national security team announced a package of sanctions aimed at causing severe economic and domestic political hardship for Putin, primary Russian state-owned banks, and some oligarchs in his inner circle. This coincides with similar moves by members of the European Union.
“The sanctions we impose exceed anything that's ever been done," Biden said at a news conference Thursday. “The sanctions we imposed have generated two-thirds of the world joining us. They are profound sanctions.”
The sanctions target fourteen people specifically:
Two oligarchs and their sons
The chairman of a prominent bank with links to the Russian military
Three sons of Putin associates, a wife, and three senior banking officials
Putin himself
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
In addition, the United States has frozen assets and the ability of at least five major Russian banks from interacting with US financial institutions. The sanctions package also places restrictions – but not outright bans – on technology-based items including semiconductors, telecommunication, encryption security, lasers, sensors, navigation, avionics, and maritime technologies.
While these measures may be the most substantial sanctions ever levied on any Russian government, potentate, or oligarch, they will do very little to alter the course Putin has charted for Ukraine or his country, Russia.
For the most part, the Russian oil industry has been left unscathed, allowing the most important revenue stream in the Russian economy to continue unabated.
OilPrice.com reported one senior US State Department official as saying:
“The sanctions that are being imposed today, as well as those that could be imposed in the near future, are not targeting and will not target oil and gas flows...We would like the market to take note that there's no need for increasing the price at the moment."
In addition to falling short on exacting pain from Russia by targeting their economy’s primary revenue-generating stream, the Biden administration and Western leaders have stopped short of removing access to the SWIFT interbank system.
Foreign Policy Magazine reported:
“Would the penalties change the war’s arithmetic for the Russian leader? The short answer seems to be no. To the consternation of many observers, the West ruled out excluding Russian banks from the SWIFT interbank messaging system. Instead, sanctions were focused on freezing the assets and impeding the activity of Russia’s five largest banks.”
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system is a global financial messaging network used by banks and other financial institutions to quickly, accurately, and securely send and receive critical information regarding financial transactions. It is the main system that facilitates cross-border international financial transactions and money transfers.
Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky and Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs, have beseeched the Biden administration to “use all US influence on some hesitant European countries in order to ban Russia from SWIFT.”
Kuleba tweeted, “Another call with my American friend and counterpart
@SecBlinken on the need to use all US influence on some hesitant European countries in order to ban Russia from SWIFT. We also discussed further supply of defensive weapons to Ukraine.”
For the most part, Zelensky and Kuleba’s request for Russia to be banished from access to the SWIFT system has fallen on deaf ears. Late Saturday it was announced that only “select” Russian banks would be removed from access to SWIFT.
”We commit to ensuring that selected Russian banks are removed from the SWIFT messaging system. This will ensure that these banks are disconnected from the international financial system and harm their ability to operate globally," reads the joint statement from leaders of the EU, France, Germany, Italy, UK, Canada, and the United States.
It is worth noting that as the West targets Russian individuals, oligarchs, and select bank assets for sanctions, Lukoil, Russia's second-largest oil producer, has completed its acquisition of fifty-percent operator interest in an offshore oil project in the Gulf of Mexico. The transaction is valued at $435 million-plus expenditures of $250 million. The US and EU country imposed sanctions do not affect this event.
Why This Is Important
From the details of the sanctions packages put forth by the United States and the assorted European nations – as Russian troops roll into Kyiv inflicting casualties to include both Ukrainian military personnel and civilians, it is clear that the outrage displayed by Western nations in the face of Putin’s naked aggression is just that: a display.
Sanctions don’t work if they aren’t sanctions that smother, isolate, and starve. This is a reality that the Biden administration and European leaders should have understood in the sanctions failures of Iran, North Korea, and as far back as Cuba. If levied sanctions don’t achieve all three of those objectives, they mean nothing.
To that end, those with eyes wide open in Europe see the weakness of the United States plainly and painfully. Guy Millière, writing for the French publication Dreuz.info, said (translated):
"To say that Biden is the worst President in the history of the United States is an understatement: Biden is a senile, villainous and corrupt puppet, guided by a bunch of leftist scoundrels who want to destroy the United States and change the order of the world in favor of a Beijing-Tehran-Moscow axis. The destruction is advancing, and the order of the world is changing..."
In examining all of the damage Biden’s presidency has brought upon the United States and on her standing in the world, it is hard not to agree with Mssr. Millière.
Without the will, intelligence, and/or foresight to see and understand why the West must enact potent sanctions that exact great pain upon not only Putin and his oligarchs but also the Russian institutions that enable their subjugative mindset – to include a substantial swath of the Russian society, there can be no hope of creating an obstacle to prevent Putin from forcefully reassembling the Soviet sphere through violent means.
That Putin is manipulative – that he has a propensity to use false-flag propaganda to advance his maniacal goals, is evident. In the run-up to his order to invade Ukraine, Mr. Putin declared:
“...It is not surprising that Ukrainian society was faced with the rise of far-right nationalism, which rapidly developed into aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism...”
Zelensky, it should be noted, is of Jewish descent. Additionally, the Jews of Ukraine know all too well what genocide tastes like.
According to the United States Holocaust Museum, German SS units and their auxiliaries executed one of the largest massacres of World War II at a ravine called Babyn Yar just outside Kyiv in late September of 1941. So, to intimate that the Ukrainian people would tolerate the metastization of neo-Nazism in its society is beyond ludicrous.
Putin continued:
“The Kyiv authorities cannot challenge the clearly stated choice of the people, which is why they have opted for aggressive action, for activating extremist cells, including radical Islamist organizations, for sending subversives to stage terrorist attacks at critical infrastructure facilities, and for kidnapping Russian citizens. We have factual proof that such aggressive actions are being taken with support from Western security services...In fact, this is nothing other than preparation for hostilities against our country, Russia.”
Perhaps it is rooted in Putin’s ego, or perhaps it is just the way of the fascist- and totalitarian-Left, but in his claim that the Ukrainian government was preparing for “hostilities” against Russia we see not only the epitome of an absurd statement but also the telegraphing of Russian evils of the past onto its victims.
According to the University of Minnesota:
“In 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, a man-made famine engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. The primary victims of the Holodomor (literally ‘death inflicted by starvation’) were rural farmers and villagers, who made up roughly 80 percent of Ukraine's population in the 1930s. While it is impossible to determine the precise number of victims of the Ukrainian genocide, most estimates by scholars range from roughly 3.5 million to 7 million (with some estimates going higher)...
“...Holodomor (which has been referred to as the Great Famine)...is an example of how prejudice and a desire to dominate and control a particular ethnic group can lead to the misuse of power, mass oppression, and genocide.”
In his defense of Russia – and, by way of Russia, the former Soviet Union, Putin manipulates history to frame the Ukrainian people as the aggressors when upwards of 7 million dead Ukrainians prove exactly the opposite.
A decades-old friend, who resides in Europe and whose professional work affords him an intimate knowledge of not only the geopolitical sphere in the European Union but how Russia and the former Soviet Union interface with the world, wrote to me:
“...we learned concrete lessons from the Second World War. Putin practices the Anschluss on Ukraine and Lugansk/Donietsk and Crimea. These are his Sudetenland. Macron behaved like Chamberlain. Belarus plays the role of Italy, China that of Japan, and Hungary that of Hungary. Nord Stream 2 is nonsense. The great unknown: who will be the host of the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century?”
If we are to avoid blundering into a very dangerous global conflict – the battle lines as defined by my European friend, then we need to use the full complement of non-lethal weapons at our disposal – at the height of their potencies and as both a nation and as a member of a global coalition, to cripple Putin in his quest to execute a Hitlerian redux.
To achieve this we cannot execute half-measures in the implementation of sanctions, and we certainly can’t justify half-measures with the excuse that they may cause economic hardship domestically. That hardship will pale in comparison to what will come to be if the alternative is a violent global conflict.
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