The collective Biden seems to be determined to crush Russia’s oil industry before Donald Trump reenters the White House on Jan. 20. “Today, the United States imposed the most significant sanctions yet on Russia’s energy sector, by far the largest source of revenue for Putin’s war,” Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council Daleep Singh said in a White House statement issued yesterday. “These sanctions will hit hard across every key node of Russia’s oil production and distribution chain, including against two of the four largest Russian oil producers, dozens of oilfield service providers, traders of Russian oil across the world, over 150 vessels moving seaborne Russian oil, and an oil terminal that knowingly received sanctioned oil from sanctioned vessels.” Singh claimed that the new sanctions “will collectively drain billions of dollars per month from the Kremlin’s war chest and, in doing so, intensify the costs and risks for Moscow to continue its senseless war.”
As for why the administration waited until now to impose these sanctions when it is about to make its exit, Singh explained it this way: “for sanctions to be successful, they must be sustainable. That doesn’t mean they should be costless—sanctions never are—but to succeed they must impact the target more than they damage the U.S. and global economy (an acknowledgment that these sanctions will cause damage to the U.S. and global economy -ed.). Until recently, we were constrained by tight supply in global energy markets, which meant that reducing Russia’s oil exports to the world would likely push up Putin’s export revenues while raising prices at the gas pump for families in the United States and across the world.”
