Yeah, but oil per barrel is pretty low. It’s a buyers market. US production is up. The Saudis, IIRC, are selling at a loss or near one. Pretty sure our dependency on Russian oil is not enough for them to be able to strong arm us. That is what all the insider BS is for.
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Eh - yeah, but what about the rest of NATO?
ETA - Germany would be like, “Pee tapes? We have lots of pee tapes. Here is my parents 50th anniversary pee tape.”
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Um, no - the headline is pretty much the opposite of the articles being linked to:
Russia PM: new U.S. sanctions amount to ‘full-scale trade war’
Trump signs Russia sanctions bill; Moscow calls it ‘trade war’
The Russian statement is that the US has initiated a trade war against Russia - and as a consequence, Russia is not hopeful of improved relations. All that Russia has declared is that they are disappointed.
Reuter’s offers their own confused headline:
Russia may impose counter-measures on U.S. after new sanctions: foreign ministry
Apparently based entirely from the statement “It’s high time to realize that threats and attempts to exert pressure on Russia will not make it change its course or sacrifice its national interests”. It’s not an unreasonable position to assume, but it is in no way reflected in the actual content of the story.
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Yeah this is all a smoke screen that says: “nothing to see here folks! no collusion! see we are fierce enemies! the fiercest! grrrr! (wink!)”
Donald Trump and I (hehe) we spoke without interpreter to set this up a few weeks ago! I happened to mention peepee tape in passing (and dead Ivanka lookalike underage hooker perhaps? some forensic DNA? video and audio of certain well…)
pass the caviar comrade!
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In this tit-for-tat conflict we’re having with them, I’m getting really confused about what tit is for which tat.
- They interfered in our election.
- We kicked out some diplomats and closed two of their properties. The Russians say they won’t respond until the new administration is in place, in hopes we’ll rescind.
- Seemingly apropos of nothing, the Senate wades into the mess months later and passes a bill with a bunch of new sanctions.
- Russia expels technically more American diplomats than are in Russia, yet still we have some number of diplomats more than zero, in response to the sanctions passed by the Senate but not yet signed into law.
- Trump ruefully signs that new bill.
- Russia threatens further retaliation for the the bill they already retaliated for, and also accuses us of starting a trade war.
It seems like it would have been better if we had hacked them back after the elections, rather than retaliating against them for something they deny and prompting them to retaliate against that retaliation. Deniability is better for everyone.
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This is what happens when the President is utterly incompetent, and congress trys to work around him.
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CHINE-ah!
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Trump, if you did not fucking dick around with the Russians during the election we would not even find ourselves in this position.
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Wow. This is great. Russia’s PM is trolling Trump and his supporters:
I read that Russia has a economy smaller than Italy’s. I don’t think we’ll lose much by not trading with them.
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Trump “administration”
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titanium, rockets, for example. Curiously they aren’t targeted yet.
Not so much natural gas, the stuff we Germans buy from the Russians since decades. Curious how that one got targeted.
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The US has large gas reserves. And aren’t there pipelines from Russia to parts of Europe? We are too far away to make buying gas economical, I think.
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Not without LNG compressors and decompressors,
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WTF was that video accompanying the tweet?
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Heavy orbital lifters.
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This wasn’t Trump’s choice. It was plain in his grumblings about it.
With near unanimous support from both houses, even if Trump were to veto the bill, he’d only further out himself as “obvious Russian puppet being obvious” and get overridden anyway.
If you recall, Russia didn’t retaliate over the final trade sanctions created under Obama because they thought their man was just going to undo them after the election. Now that it’s plain this isn’t going to happen, the trade war is back on.
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Yes, but it’s generally viewed here as Russian thing, in a similar way to samovar, or decorative carpets that can be sometimes seen on walls in Russian YouTube videos. There’s no Polish word for this kind of nesting doll, we use Russian word ‘matryoshka’.
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If they do, it will probably start of fairly mild; stern emails, stinging tweets, a horse’s head at the foot of his bed…
