In 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. imported more than 245 million barrels of Russian crude oil and other petroleum products.
At just $50 per barrel, our purchases supplied Russia — and Putin's Russian war machine — with more than $12 billion. Oil prices are higher now, and at $100 per barrel, the U.S. would provide more than $24 billion to Putin and Russia to slaughter Ukrainian men, women and children.
Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, a peaceful democracy — which has never shown an iota of intent to make war on Russia — is something straight out of Adolf Hitler's playbook.
Hitler started small:
• March 16, 1935, Hitler introduced conscription.
• March 7, 1936, Hitler occupied the Rhineland.
• March 12, 1938, Hitler invaded and annexed Austria.
• October 15, 1938, Hitler seized the Czech Sudetenland.
• March 15, 1939, Hitler invaded and occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia.
• September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and World War II begins.
Hitler's excuse was always the same. He had a duty to protect Germans wherever they lived. He had to annex Austria to protect a small German country. The Czechs were "persecuting" Sudeten Germans. The Poles were mistreating "helpless" Germans in the Polish corridor.
Putin, too, began small. In August 2008, Putin won a short war with Georgia, which lost two of its provinces to Russia. In February, 2014, Russian troops seized the Crimean from Ukraine. Then pro-Russian separatists, with Putin’s support, staged an uprising in eastern Ukraine to restore the territory to Russia and to give Putin a pretext for invasion.
In February 2022, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In all cases, his bogus justification was that these were former Russian provinces where Russian minorities were being persecuted.
In case it isn't clear to you yet, Putin is the second-coming of Adolf Hitler. Now he’s put his nuclear forces on high alert.
Like Hitler before World War II, Putin threatens anybody who would dare oppose his war crimes, but Putin threatens with nuclear annihilation.
So, what is President Biden's response to Putin's atrocities in Ukraine? Has Biden discontinued the U.S. purchases of Russian oil that are financing Putin's aggression?
Absolutely not.
The argument will be made that the U.S. also purchased oil when Trump was president. True. But if you look at the price of oil during the last year of the Trump presidency, published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, you will find that crude was selling between January 2020, and January 2021 at about $38 per barrel. Now, with oil selling at more than $100 per barrel, the U.S. is providing Russia with the barrels of money it needs to finance its atrocities in Ukraine. If Putin could buy one tank when oil was at $38, he can buy 2.5 tanks now.
Biden boasts that to date, he has imposed crippling sanctions on Russia. He has cut off Russian banks and companies from the west, targeted the Russian defense industry by restricting certain technology exports, frozen the assets of the Russian elite — as well as Putin's personal assets — and cut Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system.
It is a dog-and-pony show, designed to convince gullible American's that he is doing something meaningful that will force Putin to forgo his aggression. But Biden has not imposed the one sanction, if any, that would be truly meaningful. Shut of Putin’s oil revenues, without which Russia is broke.
Making war is expensive. In 1935, the League of Nations sanctioned Italy for invading Abyssinia. Those sanctions did not include oil. They proved feckless. Benito Mussolini snarled and continued his aggression. Putin will do likewise.
Biden, John Kerry and the other Green New Deal types have insisted on shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline here and curtailing the domestic drilling, production and distribution of oil within the United States that made us self-sufficient in natural gas and oil production, and which had the world price of oil at about $40 per barrel. And what is the result? Rather than burning our own domestic oil in the U.S., we are burning Russian oil. But instead of paying $40 a barrel for oil, Americans now pay more than $100 per barrel. The extra money is going to the likes of Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
Russia uses its revenues to launch ballistic missiles into Ukraine’s cities to indiscriminately kill women and children. Iran uses its revenues to finance the building of a nuclear arsenal. Venezuela hires mercenaries to keep Nicolas Maduro in power.
So, is the air cleaner in the U.S. because we are using Russian oil? Are Putin's explosions and fires making Ukraine air less polluted there?
If Biden doesn't destroy Putin's oil revenues, Biden is complicit in Putin’s war crimes.
Copyright 2022, John Donald O'Shea
First Published in the Moline Dispatch and Rock Island Argus on March 8, 2022
First Published in the Moline Dispatch and Rock Island Argus on March 8, 2022
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