Biden’s Russia policy is a complete failure, Russia is richer than ever and Putin kills with impunity

The Kremlin is richer than ever after two years of crippling sanctions, Ukraine is losing on the battlefield despite spending well upwards of a $100 billion, and Putin just assassinated his topic critic after the United States threatened devastating consequences. If this is winning as President Biden and the mainstream media keep telling us, what does losing look like?

For more than two years now, President Biden has railed against Russian aggression in Ukraine, promising crippling sanctions if President Vladimir Putin dared to invade and then issuing sanctions he claimed would destroy the Russian economy when they began an unprovoked war in February 2022.  The media was all-in with the administration, claiming at the time that “Western nations have responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a raft of sanctions intended to cripple the country’s economy, and economists suggest it could work.”  Simultaneously, President Biden and his enablers in the media insisted that he was revitalizing tarnished alliances and rallying NATO to Ukraine’s defense, pouring almost $115 billion US taxpayer dollars into the effort.  This after all was an existential threat, democracy versus dictatorship, and we had no other choice except to do whatever it takes to defeat Russia in Ukraine lest the bear marched on New York City, or at least Poland.  As the President himself put it, “Under my administration, the United States of America has stood shoulder to shoulder with our allies to build a NATO alliance that is bigger and stronger than ever and stands in defense of democracy against Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian aggression,” or as CNN’s “analyst” Stephen Collinson claimed last month, “The more Russian President Vladimir Putin tries to break NATO, the stronger it gets.  Not for the first time in the war in Ukraine, President Joe Biden took decisive action that closed fissures in the alliance. He announced Wednesday he would ship 31 advanced US tanks to Kyiv’s military in a move that prompted a reluctant Germany to drop its resistance to sending its own tanks and could unlock similar moves all over Europe.  This represented a significant symbolic, political and military win for Ukraine,” but three recent developments, all coming in a single week, should force even the most ardent supporters of this policy to ask themselves, if this is winning, what does losing look like?

First, CNN reported that Russia is now richer than ever despite two years of supposedly crushing sanctions.  There were signs this was the case for sometime. Now, Nick Paton Walsh and Florence Davey-Attlee found that, “Russia is entering its third year of war in Ukraine with an unprecedented amount of cash in government coffers…Russia’s federal revenues ballooned to a record $320 billion in 2023 and are set to rise further still. Roughly a third of the money was spent on the war in Ukraine last year, according to some analysts, and a greater proportion still is set to finance the conflict in 2024.  The funds at the Kremlin’s disposal put Moscow in a better position to sustain a lengthy war than Kyiv, which is struggling to maintain the desperately needed flow of Western cash.”  Despite this development, the authors and the experts continue to insist that the sanctions are working because Russia still has a budget deficit or something.  “According to an analysis of public data from the Russian finance ministry by RAND economist Howard Shatz, Russian federal revenue and expenditure were both at an all-time high in 2023. Yet Moscow still didn’t balance the books, he said, an indication of the war’s sheer cost, but also of the hit to oil revenue from sanctions.”  “Despite the jump in revenues, the federal budget deficit was at its third-highest…larger only in 2022 and 2020,” Mr. Shatz explained. “Tax on domestic production and imports are both high and effective, which means they are taxing their own population to pay for this war,” he said, as opposed to taxing some other population, I guess.  Needless to say, they fail to mention that the US budget deficit is over six times as large as a percentage of GDP, around 1% in 2023 in Russia compared to a whopping 6.3% in the United States.  Quite conveniently, they blame the surge in Russian oil sales on India, ostensibly a US ally.  “India has justified its purchases from Russia as a means of keeping global prices lower as it’s not competing with Western nations for Middle Eastern oil. India’s Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri told CNBC last week: ‘If we start buying more of the Middle Eastern oil, the oil price will not be at $75 or $76. It will be $150.’”  This, of course, is what it means to have a global market.  Russia is the fourth largest exporter of oil in the world.  If we attempt to remove them from the global supply equation, we need to make up some 8 million barrels per day or the inflation we have been rather painfully experiencing will seem like a mild blip in prices.  President Biden, of course, wanted to have it both ways – talk big about sanctions and the grand transition from fossil fuels, while fully knowing Russian oil was going to flow somewhere because the world runs on oil instead of progressive pipe dreams.

Second, the Ukrainian army no longer appears capable of maintaining even the current brutal stalemate.  Last year, the famed spring offensive was supposed to alter the dynamic of the war and set the stage for a Ukrainian victory, but Russia was able to resist the advance and retain control over the occupied territories, effectively continuing the status quo – until now.  On Saturday, Ukraine was forced to retreat from Avdiivka, a town CNN described as being “on the front lines of war between Kyiv and Moscow for almost a decade.”  “Avdiivka has been on the front lines since pro-Moscow separatists seized large portions of the Donbas region, including the nearby city of Donetsk, in 2014. Years of fighting has turned the town into a heavily fortified stronghold, with entrenchments built up over the past eight years.”  After pummeling the area with airstrikes and artillery, the Russians launched a ground assault that forced the Ukrainians into a hasty withdrawal, so hasty some 300 wounded soldiers were simply left behind.  “Leave the 300 (wounded),” one soldier was allegedly ordered, “and burn everything.”  Another soldier who remained trapped in the city, a thirty year old junior sergeant and medic, Ivan Zhytnyk, had been fighting in the region for the entire war, but was too grievously injured to move.  Prior to the Ukrainian rout, he was able to speak to his sister in a heartbreaking phone call.  “So, what, they…no one is coming? Your guys are there too (with you), or are you alone?”  He replied, “Everyone left, everyone retreated. They told us that a car would pick us up. I have two broken legs, shrapnel in my back. I can’t do anything.”  There were about a half dozen soldiers in the area, four who could not walk. His sister responded, crying, “I don’t know how to…who to call. I can’t figure it out. Who will pick you up?”

Experts are calling it the most significant Russian victory since they captured the city of Bakhmut last year.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Joe Biden have conveniently blamed this on recalcitrant Republicans, who have so far refused to provide additional “blank check” funding after the $115 billion already spent.  “We’re just waiting for more weapons,” explained President Zelensky, meaning everyone needs to fork over more money, a large percentage of which is not spent on weapons or the military, and all of which there has been no real accounting for.  President Biden helpfully offered that he would not go so far as to say Republicans “have blood on their hands,” but close (technically, the blood on their hands is a reference to the third development below, but all of these items are occurring together and it makes little difference coming from a president recently deemed mentally unfit by his own Department of Justice).  “No, I wouldn’t use that term,” the President said. “They’re making a big mistake not responding.  Look, the way they’re walking away from the threat of Russia, the way they’re walking away from NATO, the way they’re walking away from leaving our obligations, it’s just shocking … I’ve never seen anything like this.”  Left unsaid is why there is no accounting of how Ukraine spent the money in the first place, why anyone thinks spending more will change the outcome when the city in question has been a battle line with Russia for the past ten years – in fact, it was became one when Barack Obama was President.  Regardless, perhaps no single battle so far encapsulates the futility of the war strategy, especially when it was almost immediately followed by reports that Russia had taken another key town on the Dnipro River immediately after.

The third development, meanwhile, represents how little any of our efforts have succeeded in reigning in the Russian President.  Rather than cowed and cautious, Vladimir Putin remains as brazen as ever, assassinating a key political opponent and critic after jailing him on trumped up charges.  Alexey Navalny, apparently poisoned in a Russian prison, has been described by large segments of the Russian people as a “symbol of hope” for his ongoing criticism of the Kremlin.  For example, a young Russian tour guide, Valeria, told the Agence France-Presse in Moscow he was “a symbol of opposition, a symbol of hope for some brighter future for Russia. And there’s a feeling that with his death, this hope dies.  If there had still been any hope left, it is even less now than it was before.”  Mr. Navalny had escaped Russia for Germany after a previous poisoning attempt in 2021, only to return and be promptly arrested once again.  Last August, he was formally sentenced to 19 years in prison on a whole host of preposterous charges related to “extremism” (sound familiar?) on top of an existing 11 year sentence.  Despite suffering in a penal colony deep in Russia known as “Polar Wolf,” he continued to urge his fellow Russians to vote against President Putin in the sham election scheduled for next month.  Back in 2021, President Biden had personally warned his Russian counterpart of “devastating consequences” if Mr. Navalny should die in prison.  “I made it clear to him that I believe the consequences of that would be devastating for Russia,” he said.  “What do you think happens when he’s saying it’s not about hurting Navalny, all the stuff he says to rationalize the treatment of Navalny, and then he dies in prison?…It’s about trust. It’s about their ability to influence other nations in a positive way.”  Why President Biden would think his Russian counterpart, who has a long history of political assassinations would care about positively influencing anyone is inexplicable. This did not prevent him from continuing, “I also told him that no president of the United States could keep faith with the American people if they did not speak out to defend out democratic values, to stand up for the universal and fundamental freedoms that all men and women have in our view,” he said, words which were meaningless and soon ignored.

In the wake of Mr. Navalny’s assassination, President Biden has promised more sanctions, yes the same sanctions that have made Russia richer than ever, – and blamed former President Donald Trump.  “Why does Trump always blame America?” The President asked, though the former President has done no such thing.  “The former president, Trump, and other Republicans, refuse to hold Putin accountable for his death,” he continued, though, once again, no one has done any such thing and the President in particular certainly shouldn’t be talking about failing to hold Putin accountable given the old adage about glass houses and stones.  “Instead, Trump said Navalny’s death made him realize how bad America was, he continued, but this isn’t quite accurate either.  What former President Trump actually said was, “We are a nation in decline, a failing nation.”  He has also made obvious parallels to the unprecedented legal onslaught against him, which we all know has eerily familiar tones to how the current President regularly maligns his chief opponent while his allies have indicted him over 90 times.  Therefore, it is getting harder everyday to disagree that we are in decline, not when we have spent upwards of a hundred billion and expended untold hours on a policy that has completely and totally failed in a situation President Biden and his team personally insisted was an existential threat.  The outcomes we have produced are at times precisely the opposite of our stated goals.  As I said before, if this is winning, what does failure look like to these people?   Meanwhile, President Trump was roundly criticized for his comments about NATO just two weeks ago, when he claimed to have told the president of a NATO country that he would not protect them from Russia if they do not spend 2% of their GDP on defense.  In response, what did NATO do?  Immediately start spending more, precisely as Trump demanded. Needless to say, it was not widely reported in the United States, but in Britain, “NATO members are scrambling to honour their defence spending target in time for a crunch July summit taking place just days before Donald Trump’s expected coronation as Republican candidate for president.  Westminster sources told The Telegraph that European members need to arrive at NATO’s 75th Anniversary summit in Washington DC with a commitment to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence…A senior Whitehall security source said: ‘If we all rock up in Washington for the NATO summit with half of Europe still not paying 2 per cent of GDP… that would be an own goal.’”  The contrast could not be more clear, which is one of the reasons President Trump appears poised for the greatest comeback in history.