The demands, essentially, are as follows: you must surrender and give me everything I want, lift the sanctions against me, and for that, so be it, I’ll turn the tragic page and agree to build normal relations with you. Of course, he was told to go to hell with these proposals.
The thing is that the other day the United States introduced sanctions against Russian banks and the Moscow Stock Exchange, prohibiting them from trading in the U.S. dollar and introducing secondary sanctions against foreign companies and individuals who help Moscow bypass Western sanctions. Altogether, this threatens Russia’s foreign trade arrangements it built since 2022.
The entire system of Russia’s military economy, built in one way or another on purchases of all kinds of components and equipment and sales of oil and petroleum products on world markets, is now under threat of destruction. I said that even in such a serious situation as the demise of the entire Russia’s foreign trade system, which is already in the offing, this isn’t the worst news yet. Russia may face much more serious problems.
There’s this one division in the U.S. Treasury Department, which, I believe, is one of the most important agents in the entire confrontation between the West and Putin’s Russia. This department deals exclusively with sanctions against Russia. Its head is Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo, a very smart, young, and energetic American. So, this person has done for Ukraine no less, if not more, than one mechanized infantry brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The benefits of his work are enormous. He, his people, his team develop all the sanctions imposed against Russia. They come up with mechanisms to implement these sanctions, how to make sure that no one bypasses this ban, and if Russia comes up with some way to circumvent the restrictions, Adeyemo and his team are thinking about how to stop it. These people are fervently devoted to this one area: how to leave Russia and the Russian leadership without money.
And he has the full support of the U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. She’s the smartest technocrat of them all, before whom all the biggest bankers and financiers, not only in the United States, but throughout the world, bow their heads. By the way, it was Yellen who came up with the plan to loan Ukraine $50 billion in 2025 using frozen Russian assets as collateral.
So, in essence, Russia was cut off from international trade, from the possibility of using dollars normally, and in exchange for this, further burden with greater inflation and, most likely, a significant deficit of imported goods. So, Russia’s prospects with all these “joys” for the next year look increasingly gloomy. I think that next year will be a year of severe economic crisis in Russia. Maybe I’m wrong; we’ll see.
Things aren’t going too well in Russia’s military sector either. Every day, it loses some if its air defense assets in Ukraine. So, when the Russian air defense is largely destroyed, the F-16 fighter jets will fly, and the Russian ground units will be quite vulnerable under their strikes. Why am I saying all this? The Russian offensive, based on the results of which Putin was probably going to present his new ultimatum, was halted in northern Kharkiv Oblast. In general, in light of increasingly gloomy economic prospects, with military momentum sputtering out, Putin’s proposals for negotiations with Ukraine, such as “surrender, you are surrounded,” I think, sound rather strange, if not delusional.
I would like to mention one point. In Putin’s speech, the most important, the most honest, from the position of the dictator himself, seemed to me to be the line in which he declared that the mandatory lifting of Western sanctions should be part of any peace deal with Ukraine. It would seem that you’re at war with Ukraine, why does the West have anything to do with it? No, Western sanctions are probably even more important to him than maintaining or increasing control in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya or Kherson oblasts. It’s a matter of life and death for him. Now, with these new sanctions that Yellen and her deputy secretary have imposed against Russia, the demands to lift sanctions will sound increasingly louder.
I believe the Kremlin is now gradually beginning to realize that after these new U.S. restrictions, after what will follow them (as I said, these restrictions aren’t final, they’re just a warm-up, it will be much tougher later), the Russian economy will be brought to the brink of collapse. If these sanctions aren’t lifted, Russia will face a real economic disaster in 2025, I’m almost sure of it. And that’s why Putin sounded very anxious, worried, and even sincere when he asked and demanded to lift Western sanctions, as one of the conditions of a deal with Ukraine.