Russian Man Shows How Low Average Gasoline Prices Are There – Opinion

The United States has been monitoring for a month how effective sanctions are to make Vladimir Putin abandon his plan to conquer Ukraine. But that isn’t the only thing we should be gauging. What’s the baseline to measure how much pain the western world will inflict on the domestic Russian economy? What kind of pain, then, will the U.S. feel, since sanctions can be a double-edged sword?

It was the cost of one gallon gasoline that I thought would provide the most accurate way to measure the impact of sanctions and pain quotient. The average price for gasoline in the United States due to the crisis is between $4.50-$5.99 per gallon depending on where one lives.  A gallon of gasoline costs around $8.00 in the European Union.

YouTube, my favourite source for unbiased, raw news, provided a comparable figure in Russia.  And I found this wonderful, “simple Russian man” named Dan Sheekoz who posted a video on March 4, 2022.

Sheekoz went to his local gasoline station and took down the gas prices. This viral video shows how $2.00 per gallon 95 octane gasoline costs for an average Russian citizen.

A sanctions/pain index gives us a baseline of people-to-people data to see if our governments succeed or fail in using sanctions as an instrument of statecraft. Americans currently suffer from twice the economic suffering as Russians. Four times as much pain is felt at the pumps in Europe than Americans.

Quite honestly, this piece of data does not bode well for U.S. President Joe Biden’s plan to squeeze Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia is an enormous oil and gas producer and can keep prices high for a much longer time than the U.S. can bear to see our economy suffer at the pump. We may wind up assessing we are the disadvantaged ones economically, a month from now — the Europeans, even more so.

The timeline of trickle-down pain to ordinary people — from cutting off SWIFT terminal access to clamor in the streets — tends to be a slow one. Certainly, slower if a government has reserves to buffer the impact, which Putin’s Russia does. Ironically, Putin does have a trump card against Biden.  Biden still buys oil at low prices to subsidize Russian domestic fuel costs. That’s a really self-defeating strategy if one is engaging in economic warfare as a form of state siege craft. It is likely that Putin will keep his lower fuel prices and that Biden will seek another route to confront Russia constructively or quit.  In my opinion, the best plan for a capitulating is to sit and wait until the right time, based on the way Mr. Biden used the State of the Union address less like a campaign call to action than a campaign whistle-stop.

By then, given that the U.S. and NATO have no appetite to step up real military support of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s valiant effort to preserve his country as an independent state will have evaporated.  Ukraine will soon be known as the “new Hungary”. Kyiv will have become Ukraine’s Stalingrad. Putin will be expanding westward.

America will become a hollow shell of its past glory. Scott Hounsell (red state colleague) pointed out in his excellently written piece that the U.S. is bound to respect the heroic actions of Ukraine, the one nation to have given up its arsenal of thousands nuclear weapons in order to make the world a safer place after the Cold War. They are being left to the reincarnation Joseph Stalin.

As military historian William DuPuy puts it so well about failed empires, “A hundred years of glory followed by a long and arduous decline.”