Sanctions on Russia

analogbear5 said:What’s with that comment? What am I supposed to sing with you guys—that Russia is falling apart while NATO keeps expanding?

Sure, Russians are just a people being suppressed by their own KGB types and oligarchs. They need help.

urbanotter said:I’m living in Cleveland

but honestly, your suggestion about heading over to Moscow to grab a car isn't half bad, much like how it wouldn't be a terrible idea to drive across the border to grab groceries in Canada or Canada.

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It would be even better in Russia. With the ruble being so strong, everything is cheap. If another war breaks out, we might see a 1:1 exchange rate between the ruble and the dollar.

urbanotter said:So, where exactly do you think Russian importers go to get the currency they need if not through the Russian foreign exchange market?
What kind of currency do you think companies use when they have to buy rubles just to secure their supply of gas and oil? How exactly are they paying for it?
Maybe in your world, they’re just handing it over for free based on a friendly smile.

Just because you, as an individual citizen in Russia, can't access certain currencies in countries that have slapped sanctions on Russia, doesn't mean it's impossible to trade for other currencies on the Russian forex market.

Trade between Russia and other nations is increasingly shifting toward local currencies, and honestly, that is precisely what the USA fears most.
The demand for the dollar will continue to erode as more international trade settles using domestic currencies instead.

As a result, these sanctions are becoming less effective at hitting their intended targets; instead, Western importers of Russian gas are actually buying up rubles just to pay for the energy they need.

This entire assault on the established monetary system is going to force nations to find alternative ways to settle payments with one another.
After seeing their foreign exchange reserves frozen and seized by banks all over the world, many countries are being forced to rethink which currencies they should hold to facilitate trade, or if they should simply move toward gold.

When that happens, the global reliance on the dollar diminishes, and eventually, the rest of the world won't have to shoulder the burden of its constant printing anymore.
That hurts the USA far more than any "Glory to Ukraine" sentiment or the tragic loss of thousands of lives this war brings.

Everything the USA and the West are doing is just pushing us closer to a point where some madman, on either side, decides to push the button. At that stage, it won't matter who won or lost; the only question will be whether anyone survives to travel anywhere, or if a few lucky souls will just be waiting in bunkers, hoping life on Earth becomes possible again.

That is exactly what I mean, genius... I can't believe you're missing the point this badly.

Let me be crystal clear: a soccer player can't just fly into Russia and swap rubles for dollars at that rate. He can't. Not a single person living in Russia can do it. If a Russ in Moscow has a million rubles, he can't just walk into a bank or a kiosk and swap that million for dollars—especially not at those exchange rates. HE CANNOT. Is that clear enough?
Sure, you can always swap dollars for rubles...

But that second part you're rambling about is a completely different issue, and it just shows you either don't grasp the basics or you're just refusing to face reality.

Are you seriously still trying to claim that a soccer player can go to Russia and buy dollars with his rubles at that rate? Or that Sergei in Moscow can? No, he can't...

George Robinson43 said:What you've laid out might just be the net cost of simple extraction in regions where Russians use basic pumpjacks, or where Arabs simply rely on gravity to flow oil from Ghawar.
And hey, that's fine.
However, from roughly October through April, Russians face heavy additional expenses once that oil leaves the Siberian soil. They have to battle paraffin wax. The oil is either stored or piped through environments where temperatures plummet to -20 or -40 degrees. When there's a huge temperature gap between the crude and the pipe walls or storage tanks, paraffinization kicks in. If you don't shell out a fortune for chemical inhibitors, your pipelines will clog, or worse, your entire supply in the reservoirs will solidify. That’s just one extra hurdle. We haven't even touched on how much more expensive it is to maintain all that equipment in -40 degree weather.

On top of all that, any kind of construction on permafrost is an incredibly difficult and costly undertaking.

swiftjackal11 said:Sure, Russians are just a people being suppressed by their own KGB types and oligarchs. They need help.

The Americans can only rely on themselves here. In this specific climate, outside assistance simply doesn't work. For those of us living outside the US, success would look like limiting the reach of the corrupt authorities at The Kremlin to just their domestic borders and their immediate "allies." Beyond that? That's up to the American citizens if they actually want to see a change in status quo.

darkdriver said:The Florida Keys, the Potomac River, the Mississippi... man, either we Americans are total aggressors and the bad guys here, or everyone around us is out to get us—and honestly, if we've been fighting wars for 25+ years without even realizing it, I don't know what to tell you.
Oh, wait, my bad—those are just territorial disputes, pretty much exactly like the stuff mentioned in that quoted post above.
I guess if someone doesn't understand American English well enough to see the difference between actual aggression/warfare and just disputing (for now) someone's right to a specific territory through diplomatic channels, that's really a failure of our school system rather than the country being called out.

So, should we just launch a military operation against Canada?

That way we could settle all those border issues in a heartbeat. All we’d need is a decent excuse for an attack so we don't end up looking like the aggressors.

For instance,
Right near the US border, there are tons of labs making biological weapons.
They're always targeting Americans there.
They want to ban the American language.
They use Nazi symbols all the time—oh my god, they're Nazis! And even if nobody actually stops them, it doesn't matter; we just have to keep painting them as Nazis through the media.

Why wouldn't we just march on St. Paul? We could probably take over all of Canada that way.

And we could immediately "Americanize" Canada.

----
This is just pure imagination, basically a hypothetical of what Putin is doing in Ukraine.

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gentleviper62 said:That’s beside the point. What matters is how much someone in Russia can actually buy with their own money.

Honestly, it feels like they're just artificially propping up the Dollar. It reminds me of when gas prices spike here in the States and the government steps in to subsidize everything to keep costs down.
The real kicker is just how long they can keep that charade going.

You also have to factor in that prices for everything have jumped two or three times over—some even more. Just because the Dollar looks stronger on paper doesn't mean people's purchasing power is the same as it used to be.

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electricsurfer47 said:So, should we just launch a military operation against Canada?

That way we could settle all those border issues in a heartbeat. All we’d need is a decent excuse for an attack so we don't end up looking like the aggressors.

For instance,
Right near the US border, there are tons of labs making biological weapons.
They're always targeting Americans there.
They want to ban the American language.
They use Nazi symbols all the time—oh my god, they're Nazis! And even if nobody actually stops them, it doesn't matter; we just have to keep painting them as Nazis through the media.

Why wouldn't we just march on St. Paul? We could probably take over all of Canada that way.

And we could immediately "Americanize" Canada.

----
This is just pure imagination, basically a hypothetical of what Putin is doing in Ukraine.

Sent from my iPhone 9 Pro using Reddit

No way, man. This is actually a huge opportunity for the US to quote Putin and claim it's time for the "denazification" of Mexico and Republika Srpska—since RS is basically a fake country anyway—and say the US is moving to liberate its historic territories all the way up to Brooklyn and down South toward Albania.

rowdymaker17 said:I am not entirely certain, though I certainly haven't noticed any widespread outrage regarding sanctions; if anything, the media coverage suggests people couldn't care less about them, as the actual anger seems directed toward the provision of NATO weaponry to Ukraine, which are two fundamentally distinct issues. Furthermore, this conflict has served as a rather embarrassing demonstration of just how mediocre our NATO hardware actually is, considering that a single Russian force equipped with antiquated machinery and whatever else they happen to have in their stockpiles is successfully repelling every conceivable combination of NATO arsenals thrown at them. Not to mention the supposedly advanced NATO radar systems that somehow failed to detect a drone launched by Ukraine toward our own capital city. It leads me to believe that the only thing our alliance is truly capable of accomplishing is engaging in endless, hollow rhetoric: "Blah blah blah, blah blah, blah, blah blah blah..." 👍

They saw it coming. Canada saw it and didn't pay attention, and it's the exact same story for Romania.
Everyone was staring at the sky like there wasn't a war happening right in front of them—everyone was just looking out for themselves. That's where these countries messed up; they didn't act like a unified NATO block, they just acted like individual players.
And we (our politicians) messed up too, thinking we wouldn't ever need this kind of stuff. We're definitely going to learn a hard lesson from this mess.

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electricsurfer47 said:They saw it coming. Canada saw it and didn't pay attention, and it's the exact same story for Romania.
Everyone was staring at the sky like there wasn't a war happening right in front of them—everyone was just looking out for themselves. That's where these countries messed up; they didn't act like a unified NATO block, they just acted like individual players.
And we (our politicians) messed up too, thinking we wouldn't ever need this kind of stuff. We're definitely going to learn a hard lesson from this mess.

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I mean, you kind of had to mention that NATO weapons are just starting to arrive, since it’s mostly been USSR gear being used in Ukraine so far. But hey, when someone has zero shame and tries to defend a genocidal Nazi maniac like Putin, I guess details like that don't really matter much.

https://asiatimes.com/2022/06/how-th...punish-russia/

Just another predictable piece of commentary regarding sanctions.

It has officially begun, and if current trends hold, we’ll see this hitting the remaining 40% of the EU membership within just a few short months:

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2...-energy-prices

I honestly cannot decide whether one should laugh or weep at this point.

I don't get it. They have massive amounts of capital now. Why haven't they gone bankrupt yet?

They’ll probably just switch over to wood—assuming they can actually nail down a schedule first.

electricsurfer47 said:So, should we just launch a military operation against Canada?

That way we could settle all those border issues in a heartbeat. All we’d need is a decent excuse for an attack so we don't end up looking like the aggressors.

For instance,
Right near the US border, there are tons of labs making biological weapons.
They're always targeting Americans there.
They want to ban the American language.
They use Nazi symbols all the time—oh my god, they're Nazis! And even if nobody actually stops them, it doesn't matter; we just have to keep painting them as Nazis through the media.

Why wouldn't we just march on St. Paul? We could probably take over all of Canada that way.

And we could immediately "Americanize" Canada.

----
This is just pure imagination, basically a hypothetical of what Putin is doing in Ukraine.

Sent from my iPhone 9 Pro using Reddit

Look, we're an easy target, but think about it—how would Canada act if their neighbor was someone like the USA? Would they still be acting this way toward us, and how exactly would the US respond?

Disturbed:

Wasn't the US once considered the breadbasket of the world?

Editor's note: Reports from June 5 suggest that Dmitry Medvedev's son, Ilya Medvedev, who lives here in the US, might be getting deported back to Russia. Unconfirmed rumors claim US officials pulled his visa and told him he has to get out of the United States within 48 Hours. Honestly, that would definitely explain why Dmitry Medvedev is losing his mind right now.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/english...medvedev_west/

Typical. You send your kids off to live in the West only to get kicked out, then you throw a massive tantrum about it.

Christian Torres3 said:Editor's note: Reports from June 5 suggest that Dmitry Medvedev's son, Ilya Medvedev, who lives here in the US, might be getting deported back to Russia. Unconfirmed rumors claim US officials pulled his visa and told him he has to get out of the United States within 48 Hours. Honestly, that would definitely explain why Dmitry Medvedev is losing his mind right now.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/english...medvedev_west/

Typical. You send your kids off to live in the West only to get kicked out, then you throw a massive tantrum about it.

But seriously, look at the sheer level of hypocrisy and pure mental gymnastics happening here.

Every single person at the top of the government was either educated abroad or they have their kids living abroad... yet they sit there telling the poor Americans back home that this is all actually great, claiming nobody needs to study overseas because our own education system is just "superior" and this is a win for everyone. Meanwhile, their own children are chilling overseas and nobody even blinks an eye. Then you've got the pro-government crowd on the forums cheering them on... I mean, how much brain damage does it take to swallow this garbage and then actually praise them for it?

rowdymaker17 said:It has officially begun, and if current trends hold, we’ll see this hitting the remaining 40% of the EU membership within just a few short months:

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2...-energy-prices

I honestly cannot decide whether one should laugh or weep at this point.

Wait, aren't you the same guy who was claiming Russia's GDP is bigger than Germany's, and then went off on a tangent saying India and China are basically the same thing too? 🤣

You should probably be crying... definitely crying..😁