Igor Antunov wrote:
Those pipelines have been under construction for years. The gas deal (not to be confused with oil) was signed back in 2016. And it's not stopping.
And no you threw your own economy off the cliff. Just came out EU is indeed trading euros for rubles directly which is driving up demand for rubles.
It's not going to help, and you know it. What's more, it will replace a tiny fraction of what Putin sent to the West, and for less money..
"What’s important about this second Russian setback is that it interacts with another big surprise: The remarkable — and, in some ways, puzzling — effectiveness, at least so far, of Western economic sanctions against the Putin regime, sanctions that are working in an unexpected way.
However, that can’t be the whole story, because Russia seems to have lost access to imports even from countries that aren’t imposing sanctions. Matt Klein of the blog The Overshoot estimates that in March, exports from allied democracies to Russia were down 53 percent from normal levels (and early indications are that they fell further in April). But exports from neutral or pro-Russian countries, including China, were down almost as much — 45 percent.
One final point: The effect of sanctions on Russia offers a graphic, if grisly, demonstration of a point economists often try to make, but rarely manage to get across: Imports, not exports, are the point of international trade."