Why wasn’t this done 3 years ago?
IMO to limit gas/diesel prices and reduce inflation in advance of US elections. Now it is someone else’s problem.
You also have to consider the impacts to the other countries who would comply with these sanctions. You need time for them to change or the impact will be too severe, and they will just ignore them.
This takes political and economic capital. If the US were to move too quickly- esp in something where other countries obviously don’t have the same motivation to act, they could just tell the US to piss off and form their own economic system- without the US in the lead. This is a matter of calculating which option causes the least burden for those countries along with a bit of a gamble.
It’s been a game of whack-a-mole sanctioning Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers.
Money
In this particular case, I don’t think it was money per se. More like being overly cautious with rules to implement aggressive price floors for russian oil.
And the generally failed policy of “escalation management”.
well, see, there’s always a first for everything, india have been villains in paying the kremlin billions throughout all of the war
Didn’t Europe pay more for gas though? At least up until 2023
Yeah, up until the War started then began cutting Russia off, at great cost and discomfort, India on the other hand began, at the exact same time, increasing their oil and gas imports from Russia at basement prices to take advantage, dead Ukrainians be damned
India and russia are far far closer than india and usa/west. When the partition happened with india and pakistan. India was approached and aligned with soviets and pakistan by usa (as a response) thats how pakistan became a major us ally in fighting soviets in afghanistan then afterwards pakistan started getting close to china. After which us and india’s relationship became strong.
Now the situation is changing again. Pakistan is getting more pro us/west while india is getting more closer to russia.
Its a bit funny how much you can tell about geo politics just by reading the narrative in US media.
The US has often tried to get closer to India and there are a number of reasons to think US/India should be a better match. Pakistan has not been a great ally, but everyone else in the area has been far worse. Thus the US has been forced to use Pakistan as our ally in this region. Pakistan going more pro US is good, and hopefully it leads them to other good things about the US as well.
