> Open your eyes.
Use your eyes to see how the Russian offensive is going.
> Biden and other world government officials placed massive sanctions on Russia exports of oil.
China, India, Africa, etc. are happily buying it up. Oil's a fungible commodity.
(We already imported basically no oil directly from Russia pre-war, already, but uncertainty of any global scale is bad for prices. Find the tiny little Russia line on https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/US_oil_p...)
Urals crude is trading $20-$30 below Brent, and China and India have Russia over a barrel when negotiating prices. https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/urals-brent-pric...
The war has not been going well for Russia at all, stagnant at best https://understandingwar.org/project/ukraine-project
> is substantially richer
Russia has been putting out very cherry-picked data on their economy, which Western journalists have been taking at face value. They've been unable to make more PGMs, and their civilian sector is getting savaged.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4167193
Perun's Youtube channel has been a great deep-dive source into the war economy in general. If you're at all interested in how governments acquire arms, he's an indispensable watch. TL;DW: The time for Russia to win the war was February, now it's a matter of how many people and how much wrecked steel and how much of Ukraine he wants to make into a wasteland before he says uncle.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q
EDIT: Because I can't reply, Good Times Bad Times is good too. They're a bit more high-level and wider scope than Perun, and I'd recommend them as well.
You watch the Good Times Bad Times channel too by any chance?
Not gonna happen. They might keep what they grabbed, especially if the West is going to continue dragging their feet and giving Ukrainians aid at the current "attrition war" rates, but they are at the peak of what they could achieve, at least at this round. The question now is - would they be able to keep it, not whether they can grab more.
Their actions do have effects and sometimes a corrupt group of lifetime government grifters make bad decisions that have bad effects. The Orwellian framing is that nothing these people do could ever be wrong.
Open your eyes. The sanctions have done nothing to stop Russia, have driven up the cost of fuel (which benefits them, an energy exporter), and have dramatically heightened geopolitical tensions all over the world. We went from a situation where Russia was going to end up with a land bridge to Crimea, to a situation where Russia is likely going to end up controlling all of Ukraine, is substantially richer, and has driven a wedge between the US and India.