I have been trying to tell just about anyone with sense enough to listen, since pretty much the middle of April, that the SANKSHUNS against those damned ROOOOOOOOSKEEES!!!, are actually useless at best and extremely counterproductive at worst. In reality, the Western sanctions war has essentially backfired spectacularly. They have destroyed the economies of Europe, which have now been ravaged by inflation, energy shortages, and the rapid onset of severe financial crises.

By contrast, it is rather more difficult to get a read of what is going on in Russia.

Are they, too, dealing with skyrocketing food and fuel prices? Are there serious shortages of basic goods, like cooking oil, meat, bread, milk, and other staples?

Or are the Russians doing rather better than the rest of us?

Western presstitutes – who should be rounded up and subjected to expedited field executions at this point, because of their insistence on lying about basically everything – simply refuse to tell us the truth about the Russian economy. We are constantly told that their economy is in the shitter, that it is in tatters, that the Russian military is desperately short of microchips and is stealing washing machines, microwaves, refrigerators, and cars to put into its missiles, and so on. But does that bear any relation to reality?

Well, I asked my closest contact in Russia to wander around a big supermarket in a large shopping mall in southern Moscow, and film the prices of various things that she could see on the shelves. I also asked her to film a wide variety of things, so that you could see and understand whether the sanctions have severely affected the ability of ordinary Russians to buy things beyond just the basics.

You can see the results of her very kind and helpful efforts here:

This is, of course, one video from one person in one area of the biggest and most expensive city in Russia. What if you were to travel to St. Petersburg and repeat the same experiment?

Well, a Russian chap who speaks fluent English, decided to do precisely that, at a suburban supermarket in the lovely and amazingly scenic “Venice of the North”. Here are the results of his investigation:

Bear in mind, when you look at those prices, that, at current exchange rates, you have to divide by about 60 to get back to the value in dollars (or pounds, or euros – thanks to the depreciating values of both, they are pretty close to parity with the greenback at this point).

If you then do a like-for-like per-unit comparison with the costs of living in comparable cities in the West, such as London or (God help you) New York F***ing Shitty, you will quickly realise that the costs of these basic staples is FAR lower in Russia than it is in the West.

Now, I will readily admit one thing: those prices are significantly higher than what I remember paying in Moscow when I lived there in 2020. (Not, it must be said, entirely by choice – I was supposed to stay for 8 weeks, and ended up staying for EIGHT MONTHS, thanks to the Coof. All things considered, it really wasn’t that bad, I actually rather enjoyed it.)

When I lived there, you could pay RUB1,000 per day for groceries for 2-3 people (that was about US$15 back then), and you could eat well. That comes to about US$500, at the outside, for a month’s worth of groceries – and you’d be paying roughly US$800 for rent and utilities, all told, every month, for 2-4 people. That would put your cost of living at very much the lower end of the Western world.

Today, it would appear that the cost of food has gone up somewhere in the range of 50-80% – even though Russia’s currency is actually substantially stronger than it was two years ago. This is in spite of the fact that Russia is almost entirely self-sufficient in terms of food and energy production. You would imagine, therefore, that food would be much cheaper, and that prices would be going down, not up, in the wake of a projected bumper wheat and crop harvest.

What gives?

Our Greek friend, Alexander Mercouris, provided a pretty good answer in a livestream that he did with Tim Kirby recently:

(I used to follow Tim on Telegram, but I lost a lot of respect for him after getting into an argument with the guy about the true number of people that died under Stalin’s reign. He mocks the notion that something like 20 million people died under his rule, and reckons the true number is well under 2 million. I disproved that simply by looking at Russian statistics from the period, and pointed out holes in his own logic. While he did backtrack on his assertion that the notion of Stalin as a mass-murdering dictator is nothing more than a Western fabrication, I simply stopped bothering with his output after that and no longer pay attention to him. You are, of course, free to make up your own mind about it.)

In short, Russia’s status as a major food exporter, means that food prices there are actually very sensitive to the overall prices of food globally. Those have risen sharply in the wake of staggering Western money-printing during the Scamdemic, and because of these insane sanctions. So, prices in Russia have gone up too.

The result is that Russians are spending much more of their paycheques on food – and they didn’t really have a lot of slack in that department to begin with.

Beyond that, though… Russia is handling the SANKSHUNS just fine.

I know from my own contacts that life in Russia is completely normal. People are going about their daily lives without problems. Yes, they cannot go to Europe for vacations – which doesn’t bother them much, they just go to Egypt or Turkey or the UAE or Asia instead. Or, they spend time in their own majestic homeland – the beaches in Sochi are pretty nice, from what I hear, and Crimea is supposed to be wonderful in summer.

Meanwhile, inflation is falling – not slowing, FALLING. It is presently at about 13% and declining. The economy will probably shrink by 2-3% in 2022 – a painful contraction, to be sure, but far from the catastrophic 15-20% originally projected by many Western analysts at the beginning of the SMO.

Employment is stable. Factories are humming at full capacity. Industrial production has fully recovered to 2021 levels. The energy sector is raking in record profits. The government is fully able to pay for substantial increases in pensions and social benefits, especially for the families of veterans, and is investing billions of rubles into the reconstruction of devastated cities in the new regions of Novorossiya.

I do not want to make light of the difficulties that Russians face. The life of the average, ordinary Russian is still difficult. Food prices in Moscow are not actually substantially higher than in the rest of the country – this has always been a major problem with Russia, one that I have heard from more than one Russian. Food is expensive, relative to salaries, no matter where you go in the country – it’s not like in the US, where, if you go to the countryside, your grocery bill is probably half what it is in a really big city.

Salaries are much lower than they should be, given the productivity and skill of the Russian worker. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of working with Russians, you know what I mean – they are smart, talented, capable, efficient, tough-minded, and genuinely good fun to work with once you break past their initial reserve. They respect competence and hard work, and have no patience for bureaucratic stupidity or “measuring”.

But, overall, life in Russia is better than it is in most of the West – SUBSTANTIALLY so. Gas and electricity in Russia are fantastically cheap, and petrol – note to Americans, STOP SAYING “GAS” WHEN YOU MEAN A LIQUID!!! – is US$3.31/gal, substantially below the US average and about HALF what you would pay in many European countries.

In summary, the SANKSHUNS are TOTES WERKIN‘ – against the West. They are definitively NOT working against Russia. The Russian Bear is not crippled, hungry, cold, or trapped. Europe is, and has disembowelled itself, to boot. And it did all of that simply to please its American (((masters))), the foreigners who occupy the geographical footprint of what was once the American nation.

For the good of Europe, for the good of the entire world – these sanctions must end.