NATO and Biden can crush the Russian economy

From what I hear, things are pretty sucky in Russia. The economy is terrible and their vaccines don’t work. The government rushed vaccine development, skipping essential human trials. As a result, Russians don’t want anything to do with the stuff.

So, a lot of people are sick and dying, unnecessarily. Dark times. And now it looks like they have a war on their hands, a war that most Russians don’t want.

It’s the price of dictatorship. Dictators start wars when the people are getting restless. So, unless Putin comes to his senses, there will be a big ground war in Ukraine. Putin won’t come to his senses because he has made his mind up about something.

No one is exactly sure what.

Biden and NATO don’t want another war. Wars never make things better. But Biden and NATO have powerful weapons, financial weapons called sanctions.

They could literally destroy the Russian economy by cutting them off from the international banking system. There is a system called SWIFT which enables global banking transactions. We have the ability to cut off access to SWIFT in Russia, meaning they would be cut off from the global economy.

The ruble would crash into worthlessness overnight.

It would be terrible for the Russian people, the regular folks, not the oligarchs like Putin and his cronies. They have already moved their money out of the country, laundered it by buying real estate all over the planet, and by financing various profitable illegal activities.

Britain has already tried to limit their ability to buy British real estate after they started outbidding everyone and stockpiling luxury homes and estates that they don’t live in. It’s happening in the US too. Who do you think buys all those multimillion dollar condos in huge developments like New York’s Hudson Yards? An abomination by the way.

Nobody lives in most of those places, most of the time. They built a seven story luxury mall in the Yards and the stores started failing almost immediately. Covid didn’t help, but most of these stores were high end luxury goods retailers, selling things people with unlimited money buy. Mostly useless things.

But if they are not there, there will be no splurging. And if we cut off the Russian economy, the splurging will end in a lot of places.

But for regular Russians, there never was any splurging and things will get really bad for the average person on the street, even worse than normal.

I don’t think this is a great scenario for the West, to impoverish a whole nation overnight. But we might have to.

Most Americans don’t think much about Ukraine. It’s a long ways away and we have a lot on our plates right now. But it matters.

Invasions by dictators start world wars. Just to remind folks, Russia lost 50 million people in WWII. They were fighting on our side after making the mistake of aligning themselves with Hitler at the beginning of the war, a mistake that almost resulted in Germany defeating Russia.

Biden has forcefully stated that an armed conflict between the US and Russia would be WWIII. Not might be, would be.

That is an option he has ruled out. So we may have to fire salvos of destructive sanctions at Russia, all the while keeping watch over our shoulders at the Chinese.

We really don’t need this during a worldwide pandemic. But it’s here, like it or not, and we will have to use the weapons we can.

It just sucks, that like all wars, it’s the regular Russian and Ukrainian people who will suffer for something they don’t want and don’t need.