Thread: Economic sanctions

"Classified or unspecified expenditure through March 24 has surged to 2.4 trln rubles ($31bn). The secrecy around the single biggest-ticket item speaks to the scale of the fiscal commitment to the war effort that Putin promised will have 'no limitations'."

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Originally Posted by OhOh

27 Mar, 2023 15:30


HomeBusiness News


Russian diesel exports surge despite EU ban – Bloomberg

Because it's as cheap as chips you fucking moron.

The Truth About Russia's Economic Power: Is It Really as Small and Weak as the West Claims?
"The size of California?" Not a chance. Delve into the little-known nitty-gritty of Russia's true economic size and productive potential."

The Truth About Russia'''s Economic Power: Is It Really as Small and Weak as the West Claims?

One measure, more examples in the article.Composite Index of National Capability


"The Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) is a statistical measure of national power created by J. David Singer for the Correlates of War project in 1963. It uses an average of percentages of world totals in six different components.

The components represent demographic, economic, and military strength.[1] More recent studies tend to use the (CINC) score, which “focuses on measures that are more salient to the perception of true state power” beyond GDP.[2]

It is still “among the best-known and most accepted methods for measuring national capabilities.”


Composite Index of National Capability - Wikipedia


Composite Index of National Capability - Wikipedia

Methodology

Each component is a dimensionless percentage of the world's total.


RATIO= Country / World


CINC = (TPR+UPR+ISPR+ECR+MER+MPR) / 6


Where


TPR = total population of country ratio


UPR = urban population of country ratio


ISPR = iron and steel production of country ratio


ECR = primary energy consumption ratio


MER = military expenditure ratio


MPR = military personnel ratio

The top 10 countries:

Yes, let's all measure 2023 by 1963 standards.

You dumb shit.

3 Apr, 2023 16:12


HomeBusiness News


G7 member buying Russian oil above Western price cap – WSJ

Energy-dependent Japan agreed to support the measure to limit Moscow's revenues, but then asked for an exemption from the US

"One of the Group of Seven (G7) nations, Japan, has started buying Russian crude oil above the $60-a-barrel agreed cap after securing a US-authorized exception, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

According to the news outlet, Tokyo, which relies heavily on energy imports, reportedly got the concession from Washington, saying it needed it to ensure access to Russian fuel. Official statistics show that, in the first two months of this year, Japan bought around 748,000 barrels of Russian oil for approximately $70 a barrel.

Tokyo joined the price cap on Russian oil imports late last year, as part of a coordinated effort to lower Moscow's oil revenues pitched by Japan’s long-time ally, the United States, and supported by the G7, the EU, and Australia. However, Tokyo exempted oil imports from the Sakhalin-2 project from the cap, stating that such a move would endanger the country’s energy security.

An official at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry told the Journal that Tokyo wanted to ensure access to Sakhalin-2’s main product, natural gas, which is liquefied and shipped to Japan. “We have done this with an eye toward having a stable supply of energy for Japan,” the official reportedly said.

He explained that a small quantity of crude oil is extracted alongside the natural gas at Sakhalin-2 and needs to be sold to ensure liquefied natural gas (LNG) production continues. “The price is decided by negotiations between the two parties,” the unnamed official told the Journal.

The report pointed out that Russia accounts for nearly 10% of Japan’s natural-gas imports, most of it from Sakhalin-2, with volumes of purchases by Japan rising 4.6% last year in comparison to 2021.

The Journal also cited Japanese officials as saying it would be self-defeating to give up access to Russian LNG because Moscow could sell it to China.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced late last month that the country’s companies would continue to participate in Russian energy projects on Sakhalin Island due to their importance for Tokyo’s energy security."

G7 member buying Russian oil above Western price cap – WSJ — RT Business News

OhDoh posts another misleading piece of propaganda from RT with "quotes" from the WSJ. Utter crap and belongs it he dh.

Ben Aris is pro Nato and runs a CIS business news outlet. Business news | data | Eastern Europe | Eurasia | Middle East | Africa

All of skiddys "data" supplied by the kremlin. What an epic level vatnik retard.

Well fuck, that's the end of the dollar then.

These two vatnik retards are a barrel of laughs, but skiddy takes the cake this round. His last post claimed that ruzzia has international reserves of $600bn. They have no international reserves at all, as they have been seized.

What a fucking clown.

Originally Posted by bsnub

All of skiddys "data" supplied by the kremlin. What an epic level vatnik retard.

It is the actual data you brainwashed retard. Your whole claim to fame in all this Russia bs is that Russia has no money. You thought Russia wouldn't start the war in Ukraine because of the money. And after a whole year at war, with 14,000 sanctions against it , Russia has the 4th most foreign exchange reserves in the world. And this doesn't even include the other national funds that the country has


As of March 31 2023



And this does not include the Russian sovereign wealth fund. Which has 182 billion in it give or take. As this Finnish publication verified in 2022. Russia’s National Welfare Fund continues to grow So if those are added to the total it comes to around 775,900.

Russia, China record highest trade surplus in 2022, says data - World News

China positioned itself as the top among the major economies as its surplus trade grew by 30 per cent last year to an all-time high of $877.6 billion. It exported nearly $3.59 trillion worth of goods—a growth in export value of about 7 per cent compared to the last year. While imports surged only by 1.1 per cent to roughly $2.72 trillion. Russia was placed second as its surplus increased by 1.7 times over the year to a record $333.4 billion. The country’s total exports reached $591.4 billion, up 19.9 per cent from 2021.

Without firing a shot, President Joe Biden’s team and American allies are successfully waging an economic war against Russia, my analysis of data from the Kremlin and other sources shows.

Vladimir Putin’s economic muscle is fast withering even as his inept generals, demoralized conscripts, and mercenaries recruited from the Gulag fail to gain much ground against the scrappy Ukrainians with their flexible field tactics, superior intelligence gathering, and expanding arsenal of sophisticated American and European weapons.

Russia’s economy, never vibrant, is now in tatters. Russia is pretty much a one-note economy: Fossil fuel exports pay the bills. More than 75 percent of Russian exports are fossil fuels, chemicals, and other products made with fossil fuels.

That lack of diversity makes Russia vulnerable to smartly designed and rigorously enforced Western economic sanctions. The sophisticated sanctions drawn up by the Biden administration are proving far more effective than the sanctions imposed by previous administrations against various misbehaving countries, sanctions that were mostly cosmetic and easily sidestepped.

Ominously for Putin, Russian oil now sells for well below the world price of oil, another sign of effective economic sanctions.

The European Union has cut Russian oil imports from about 750,000 barrels per day to near zero. Europe’s replacement oil is coming largely from the Middle East, a boon to dictators there, but a tightening vice on the Kremlin pocketbook.

Europe has also weaned itself off cheap Russian natural gas, which Putin mistakenly thought gave him a cudgel with which to beat Europeans into closing their political eyes or at least looking the other way at his Ukraine invasion. Some more cynical experts asserted when the war started that Europe would never make these moves, but Europe has proven them wrong.

Comparing three prices for oil illustrates Putin’s revenue problem.

West Texas Intermediate, an American oil used to set benchmark prices, has plummeted more than 44 percent, from a high of $123.68 last year to $69.20 last Friday.
Brent crude, oil from beneath the Atlantic between Scotland and Norway, is selling at $73, down from $114 last June.

The price of Russian oil fell from $92.20 a barrel a year ago to $49.50 this month. That’s a 46 percent decline. Those figures come from the Kremlin Finance Ministry.

Since the war began, the ministry has cut back sharply on the release of information. Still, its statistical reports assert that the Russian economy is growing.
That’s hard to believe because of a 30 percent drop in Russian net exports—mostly fossil fuels—from a year ago.

But then it’s much easier to fudge or even outright lie about domestic economic numbers than those for imports and exports because data from other countries can be compared to Russian Finance Ministry reports.

Because of sanctions, Russian oil shipped on water by tanker is limited to $60 a barrel, well below the two benchmarks for crude. Actual Russian price: lower by more than $10 per barrel, based on the Kremlin’s own account.

The West can limit the price to $60 because seagoing tankers rely on maritime insurance companies that Western governments can make comply with their sanctions on Russia.

To get around this it is widely believed that Russia has been paying huge premiums to buy aging oil tankers. This will help Russia create a shadow fleet to, maybe, get around the $60 price cap.

Savvy reporters atBloomberg, CNN, and The Washington Post are among those who sussed out the purchases of old tankers through fronts.

Russia no longer has oil buyers with strong finances. Its remaining overseas oil customers include Cuba, Egypt, North Korea, and Sri Lanka, all countries with little capacity to pay cash for imported oil.

The one bright spot for Putin is the oil he moves by pipeline to China and other neighbors on whom maritime sanctions have no effect. That’s almost certainly one of the topics that Putin raised when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow last week.

Putin has also driven some of the best minds out of his country, a costly brain drain that will further weaken government revenues, perhaps reduce revenue from cybercrimes, and hurt long-term economic growth. Ukraine also has a brain drain.

The Western oil companies with the technological skill to extract oil from the harsh Russian climate—including BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell—have all withdrawn from Russia, which will likely mean damage to Russian oil fields, pipelines, and refineries due to a lack of technical expertise.

Poor management of oil fields and equipment is an old story in Russia, which in the Soviet era relied on corporate spies in America to improve its petroleum technologies.

Because Western companies won’t sell Russia spare parts, its internal air travel network is shrinking. Many Russian jetliners were impounded overseas. Airbus and Boeing jets are being cannibalized for parts, which risks compromising flight safety.

Putin is also vulnerable because, despite almost as much land mass as America and China combined, the Russian economy is small. In 2021 Russia’s economic output, or gross domestic product, was less than $1.8 trillion, compared to $23.3 trillion for the United States.

California alone has a $3.4 trillion economy, almost twice the size of Russia’s but with only about a fourth as many people.

Russia’s economy is $4 trillion when measured using purchasing power parity, the most favorable way to compare Russia to the rest of the world. That’s still not much more economic output than California, which if it were a nation would have the world’s fourth-largest economy.

Russia’s ability to import is also weakened by the falling ruble, down 30 percent against the dollar since the war on Ukraine began in late February 2022. Computers, machinery, and vehicles account for more than 40 percent of Russian imports, items all needed to pursue the war that now cost much more at a time when money to buy these items is tighter than tight.

My analysis of the latest Russian Federation budget shows that spending in the first two months of this year was 59 percent greater than in the same period in 2022 and 90 percent more than in 2021. That hints at how much Russian economic activity has shifted to war.

At the same time, government revenues fell 28 percent and oil revenues fell 46 percent.

Rising spending and falling revenues aren’t sustainable, especially for a country that must sometimes borrow in foreign currencies, unlike the U.S., which has no trouble rolling over its debts and taking on more debt.

At some point, the Russian Federation’s fiscal mismatch, the falling ruble, and weak export revenues, along with revulsion at the war, have led to scattered demonstrations despite the Russian culture of coping with privation, queues, and government oppression.

To finance his war, Putin has been breaking into the national piggy bank. In a year, he has drawn down more than a fifth of the Russian sovereign wealth fund. In September 2021, it stood at 14 billion rubles, but it shrank to 11 billion rubles this month, which is less than $150 billion. For a country the size and population of Russia, that’s not a lot—even without a war.

In time, Putin will run out of economic bullets to buy war material—drones, missiles, and Wagner Group mercenaries. Every policy that forces Putin to spend down Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, constrains his revenue from exports, and makes technology and spare parts difficult to get is a smart way to stop his atrocities.

https://newrepublic.com/article/1714...broke-fast-why

Originally Posted by Backspin

It is the actual data you brainwashed retard.

No, it is not you dimwit. You calling anyone brainwashed is utterly laughable, but since you suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome it is not surprising. Soon you will have your reckoning vatnik. Once the Ukrainians smash through paper thin front lines and drive deep to the rear, smashing all ruzzian resistance, you will be unable to push your fake kremlin supplied propaganda.

Your day is coming, scum.

Originally Posted by bsnub

No, it is not you dimwit. You calling anyone brainwashed is utterly laughable, but since you suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome it is not surprising. Soon you will have your reckoning vatnik. Once the Ukrainians smash through paper thin front lines and drive deep to the rear, smashing all ruzzian resistance, you will be unable to push your fake kremlin supplied propaganda.

Your day is coming, scum.

So World Bank data posted on Wikipedia is fake ? Lets see that again. Lets see how that economic war is doing.

Originally Posted by bsnub

To finance his war, Putin has been breaking into the national piggy bank. In a year, he has drawn down more than a fifth of the Russian sovereign wealth fund. In September 2021, it stood at 14 billion rubles, but it shrank to 11 billion rubles this month, which is less than $150 billion. For a country the size and population of Russia, that’s not a lot—even without a war.

In time, Putin will run out of economic bullets to buy war material—drones, missiles, and Wagner Group mercenaries. Every policy that forces Putin to spend down Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, constrains his revenue from exports, and makes technology and spare parts difficult to get is a smart way to stop his atrocities.

Putin’s Russia Is Going Broke Fast. Here’s Why. | The New Republic

Another completely air headed columnist getting the sovereign wealth fund mixed up with foreign exchange reserves! This happened in 2014 too. And it confirms what I am saying. Russia has 600 billion in FX reserves plus over 100 billion in the sovereign wealth fund. Which adds up to over 700 billion in reserves.

I have been wondering where some of these columnists are getting their numbers. Now I know. Thanks for that.

Originally Posted by bsnub

We know where you get yours. Fantasyland.

Just because those assets are still listed means nothing. They have been frozen and most likely will be seized and used to rebuild Ukraine. Furthermore, the article I posted is spot on. You are just a hopeless retard who as usual has no idea what he is talking about.

I got mine from the World Bank. They are the fucking updated numbers. You have no ground to stand on here. The numbers are the numbers.

The number of assets stolen and frozen by the US and EU was not just central bank reserves. It was oil and gas leases, capital and equipment from Russian state owned companies ect. That total came to 300+ billion. It was not 300 billion clean off the Russian FX reserve balance sheet. Total cash reserve theft only ended up being around 130-150 billion.

And Russia saved that amount back up in the meantime. Bloomberg- Russia Built $80 Billion Offshore Cash Pile in Year of Sanctions Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

It has been a year since the US and EU went on their big freezing spree on Russian assets. And reality has caught up to it.

France 24 Seizing Russian assets is easier said than done

Paris (AFP) – The idea is seductively simple: the West should turn over billions of dollars of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine to fund reconstruction. But it faces major legal problems which mean little progress has been made.

No matter how you try and spin it, the ruzzian economy is in a death spiral. Soon it will get to the point that even utter morons like you will no longer be able to spin your nonsense.

MOSCOW—The opening months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year drove an increase in oil and natural-gas prices that brought a windfall for Moscow. Those days are over.

As the war continues into its second year and Western sanctions bite harder, Russia’s government revenue is being squeezed and its economy has shifted to a lower-growth trajectory, likely for the long term.

The country’s biggest exports, gas and oil, have lost major customers. Government finances are strained. The ruble is down over 20% since November against the dollar. The labor force has shrunk as young people are sent to the front or flee the country over fears of being drafted. Uncertainty has curbed business investment.

“Russia’s economy is entering a long-term regression,” predicted Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian Central Bank official who left the country shortly after the invasion.

There is no sign the economic difficulties are bad enough to pose a short-term threat to Russia’s ability to wage war. But state revenue shortfalls suggest an intensifying dilemma over how to reconcile ballooning military expenditures with the subsidies and social spending that have helped President Vladimir Putin shield civilians from hardship.

Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska warned this month that Russia is running out of cash. “There will be no money next year, we need foreign investors,” the raw-materials magnate said at an economic conference.

Having largely lost its European market next door, and with other Western investors pulling out, Moscow is becoming ever more reliant on China, threatening to realize long-simmering fears in Moscow of becoming an economic colony of its dominant southern neighbor.

“Despite Russia’s resilience in the short term, the long-term picture is bleak: Moscow will be much more inward-looking and overly dependent on China,” said Maria Shagina, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank in London.

A big part of the dimming outlook stems from a bad bet by Mr. Putin last year that he could use Russian energy supplies to limit Western Europe’s support for Ukraine.

European governments, instead of tempering their support for Kyiv, moved rapidly to find new sources of natural gas and oil. Most Russian gas flows to Europe stopped, and after an initial jump, global gas prices fell sharply. Moscow now says it will cut its oil production by 5% until June from its previous level. It is selling its oil at a discount to global prices.

As a result, the government’s energy revenue fell by nearly half in the first two months of this year compared with last year, while the budget deficit deepened. The fiscal gap hit $34 billion in those first two months, the equivalent of more than 1.5% of the country’s total economic output. That is forcing Moscow to dip deeper into its sovereign-wealth fund, one of its main anti-crisis buffers.

The government can still borrow domestically, and the sovereign-wealth fund still has $147 billion, even after shrinking by $28 billion since before the invasion. Russia has found ways to sell its oil to China and India. China has stepped in to provide many parts Russia used to get from the West.

Russian officials have acknowledged the difficulties but say the economy has been quick to adapt. Mr. Putin has said his government has been effective in countering the threats to the economy.

“You know, there is a maxim, guns versus butter,” Mr. Putin said in a state-of-the-nation address last month. “Of course, national defense is the top priority, but in resolving strategic tasks in this area, we should not repeat the mistakes of the past and should not destroy our own economy.”

For much of Mr. Putin’s more than 20 years in charge, high oil and gas revenue underpinned a social contract that saw most Russians largely staying out of opposition politics and protests in exchange for rising living standards.

The International Monetary Fund has estimated that Russia’s potential growth rate—the rate at which it could grow without courting inflation—was around 3.5% before 2014, the year it seized Crimea from Ukraine. That has now fallen to around 1%, some economists say, as productivity declines and the economy becomes technologically backward and more isolated.

“For an economy like Russia, 1% is nothing; it’s not even a maintenance level,” said Ms. Prokopenko, the former central bank official.

The fall in exports, tight labor market and increased government spending are worsening inflation risks, the central bank said this month. Russia’s inflation was running at around 11% in February compared with that month last year. That rate will temporarily fall below 4% in the coming months, the central bank said, though that is because of the high comparison base of the post-invasion surge in prices last year. A number of other economic indicators will also temporarily improve in the coming months due to such base effects, economists say.

The country’s industry is in its worst labor crunch since records began in 1993, the Moscow-based Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy has said. The post-invasion brain drain and last fall’s 300,000-man military mobilization have resulted in around half of businesses facing worker shortages, according to the central bank. Locksmiths, welders and machine operators are in high demand.
On a recent visit to an aircraft factory, Mr. Putin said the labor shortage is hampering military production. He said the government has prepared a list of priority professions for deferment from service.

Before the war, Oleg Mansurov dreamed of competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. After the invasion, investors in Mr. Mansurov’s Moscow-based SR Space pulled their funds.

By April 2022, the private company, which he launched in 2020 with venture-capital funding, was facing bankruptcy. To save it, he turned it into an IT business, providing services from web design to analyzing satellite imagery.

Western satellite-imaging-service companies had left the Russian market over the war, and Mr. Mansurov secured interest from large state-controlled enterprises that previously rejected his approaches, such as Gazprom PJSC and the nuclear-engineering company Rosatom.

“We became more focused not on the development of a long-term product that would make some kind of qualitative leap but on simply becoming a classic business and generating revenue,” Mr. Mansurov said. “We understood we just had to survive.”

Companies are adapting to the West’s import bans. While Moscow has boosted imports of technologies critical to its war in Ukraine from other countries, including semiconductors and microchips from China, in many civilian sectors, parts are difficult to replace.

The central bank has said risks are rising in the airline sector, where a deficit of new aircraft and parts could lead to problems with maintenance. IT and finance firms are struggling without access to Western technologies such as software, database-management systems and analytics tools and equipment, the bank said.

Russia tried import substitution—replacing foreign goods with homemade ones—for years before the current sanctions, with limited success. A large chunk of its telecommunications equipment and advanced oil drilling software is imported.

“This is a little bit like going back to Soviet times, doing everything ourselves,” said Vasily Astrov, an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “It will be nearly impossible to properly replace what’s missing.” Analysts at the central bank have called the postwar reality “reverse industrialization,” suggesting a reliance on less-sophisticated technology.

Ilya Korovenkov, director of Chili. Lab, a boutique IT company in Nizhny Novgorod developing web services and e-marketplaces, said that before the war, clients would often order new capabilities and functions. Now, the work is focused on fixing and improving existing systems.

“It’s logical,” he said. “We don’t know what will happen in a month. We need to wait it out.”

With all these changes, the Russian economy is becoming more dependent on the state.

Much industrial-production growth now comes from factories turning out missiles, artillery shells and military clothing, replacing the vast quantities used in the war. Some factories are working multiple shifts to cope with demand, Mr. Putin has said.

While official statistics don’t break out military production, the output of “finished metal goods”—a line that analysts say includes weapons and ammunition—rose by 7% last year. Production of computers, electronic and optical products, another line said to include military output, rose by 2% for the year and 41% in December compared with November. By contrast, auto output fell about 45% year-over-year.

Military production masks the problems. “This isn’t real, productive growth. This doesn’t develop the economy,” Ms. Prokopenko said.

Russia managed to avoid the worst last year, aided initially by high global energy prices. Gross domestic product fell 2.1%, according to official data, far less than some early forecasts of a 10% to 15% drop.

Gas exports to Europe didn’t start tailing off until last summer. The EU’s ban on Russian seaborne oil and a Group of Seven price cap began to take effect only in December. Sanctions on oil products such as diesel took effect last month. These delays kept energy revenue up and helped the government unleash a huge fiscal stimulus of around 4% of GDP in 2022, according to the IMF.

In January and February of this year, however, oil and gas tax revenue, which accounts for nearly half of total budget revenue, fell by 46% year-over-year, while state spending jumped more than 50%.

Analysts estimate that Russia’s fiscal break-even oil price—what it would need to balance its books—has swelled to over $100 a barrel as war spending weighs on the budget.

The country’s flagship Urals crude fetched an average of $49.56 a barrel in February, according to the Ministry of Finance, a deep discount to the benchmark Brent, which traded around $80 a barrel that month, although some analysts argue the difference is smaller. The government last month changed its oil-taxation formula in an effort to squeeze more from producers.

“Russia now has a lower bargaining power in the world oil market because they have much less choice where to ship the oil,” said Mr. Astrov, the Vienna Institute economist.

Consumers are ailing, too. Retail sales fell 6.7% in 2022, the worst showing since 2015, according to official data. New-car sales fell by 62% in February year-on-year, according to the Moscow-based Association of European Businesses.

Nearly a decade ago, Artem Temirov and his brother launched a coffee shop in central Moscow they called Kooperativ Chernyy, or the Black Cooperative. Just before the war, they opened a roaster and planned to begin selling their coffee beans in supermarkets.

The invasion halted those plans. Russia’s postwar exodus has included many who could afford to spend at a high-end shop like Kooperativ Chernyy, and sales fell. Despite a pick-up in the summer—which Mr. Temirov attributed to Russians wanting to ignore their new reality—sales cratered again after Mr. Putin’s September troop mobilization.

For this year, most analysts expect another fall in GDP, although some, including the IMF, forecast modest growth.

But the fund said that by 2027, economic output is projected to be around 7% lower than pre-war forecasts had indicated. “The loss in human capital, isolation from global financial markets, and impaired access to advanced technology will hamper the Russian economy,” the IMF said.

Rystad Energy, a consulting firm, expects investment in Russian oil and gas exploration and production to fall to $33 billion this year from a predicted $57 billion before the invasion. That would mean less output down the line. Analysts at BP PLC estimate that Russia’s total oil production, which was around 12 million barrels a day in 2019, will be down to between 7 million and 9 million a day by 2035.

“We’re not talking about a one-year or a two-year crisis,” said Mr. Astrov. “The Russian economy will be on a different trajectory.”

Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come Undone - WSJ

Yet another vague mumbo jumbo article with no hard data or real facts. That also gets the sovereign wealth fund mixed up with Russia's foreign exchange reserves.

The government can still borrow domestically, and the sovereign-wealth fund still has $147 billion, even after shrinking by $28 billion since before the invasion.

This just shows the dangers and the stupidity of bad propaganda. There are politicians voting on these Ukraine spending bills who actually think Russia has just 147 billion to its name. When the real combined sovereign fund and foreign exchange are north of 700 billion.

List of countries by foreign-exchange reserves - Wikipedia

Total cash reserve theft only ended up being around 120-130bn.

As little as that? You are a bigger bluffer than Putin is backspin! 5555

None of this matters to the high heeled war criminal. He's probably trousered that much into his personal accounts, and he won't be giving it back except at gunpoint.