But Biden is buying Putin oil for the next 45 days.
45x$130x800,000 = $4,680,000,000
Nearly $5B for Biden's Ukraine war chest.
1. What is being banned?
Crude oil, petroleum, petroleum fuels, oils, liquefied natural gas, and coal from Russia. The ban doesn’t include Russian uranium, which made up about 16% of U.S. uranium imports in 2020. The order allows for a 45-day wind down period for deliveries of existing purchases that are already under contract, a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday. Americans will also be prohibited from participating in foreign investments that flow into Russia’s energy sector.
2. How big an impact will that have?
Purely by the numbers, not much. U.S. refiners were already voluntarily curbing imports of Russia’s high-sulfur crude, which represented about 3% of U.S. crude imports last year. So far this year, the imports have been on the the slowest annual pace since 2017, according to the intelligence firm Kpler. On natural gas, the Biden ban is little more than symbolic since the U.S. has grown into a leading exporter of LNG and therefore hasn’t accepted gas from Russia since 2019. As for coal, the U.S. bought some 307,000 metric tons of anthracite coal from Russia in 2021.
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