White House Caught Secretly Airlifting $1.7 Billion US Taxpayer Cash To Tehran To Ensure Iran Nuclear Accord Success

Tyler Durden's picture

What Donald Trump has proclaimed the worst deal ever made, may just have become worst-er. The shocking truth behind the US-Iran nuclear deal, as WSJ reports, is that John Kerry and the Obama Administration airlifted $1.7bn of cash in ‘compromise’ payments (read – bribe) to Tehran to ensure the release of 4 captured sailors coincidentally the same weekend as the signing of the nuclear deal.

With all the chatter of helicopter money as solution to the western world’s economic ills,The Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon and Carol Lee expose, it appears The Obama Administration is already busily dropping cash where ever it needs things done in a hurry…

Continue reading “White House Caught Secretly Airlifting $1.7 Billion US Taxpayer Cash To Tehran To Ensure Iran Nuclear Accord Success”

Is Washington Coming To Its Senses?

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

There is much speculation about US Secretary of State John Kerry’s rush visit to Russia in the wake of Russia’s successful Victory Day celebration on May 9. On May 11, Kerry, who was snubbing Russia on the 9th, was on his way to Russia, and Putin consented to see him on May 12.

As time passes we will find out why Kerry was snubbing Putin on May 9 and 3 days later was criticizing Washington’s puppet regime in Ukraine. For what is known at this time, a possible explanation is that Washington is coming to its senses.

If you watched the 1 hour 20 minute video of the Victory Day Parade, you are aware that the celebration sent a powerful message. Russia is a first class military power, and Russia is backed by China and India, whose soldiers marched with Russia’s in the parade.

So, while the increasingly irrelevant West, absorbed in its own self-importance, snubbed the celebration of the victory that the Red Army gave them over Hitler, the three largest countries in the world were present united. Russia has the largest land mass, and China and India, also large land masses, have the world’s largest populations.

The celebration in Moscow made it clear that Washington has failed miserably to isolate Russia. What Washington has done is to make the BRICS more unified.

Continue reading “Is Washington Coming To Its Senses?”

Kerry and “fuck the EU” Nuland meet with Putin: Russia Wins

Have you read or heard about this on ANY whore media network? I didn’t think so. The USA!USA!USA! …. outmaneuvered once again.

Unless you read Russian or monitor the free blogosphere, you might not have noticed this, but something big just happened in Russia: Kerry, Nuland and a large State Department delegation have traveled to Sochi were they met with Foreign Minister Lavrov and then with President Putin. With the latter they spent over 4 hours. Not only that, but Kerry made a few rather interesting remarks, saying that the Minsk-2 Agreement (M2A) was the only way forward and that he would strongly caution Poroshenko against the idea of renewing military operations.

To say that this is a stunning development would be an understatement.

For one thing, this means that the so-called “isolation of Russia” is now officially over, even for the “Indispensable Empire”.

Second, this is, as far as I know, the first official US endorsement of M2A. This is rather humiliating for the US considering that M2A was negotiated without the Americans.

Third, for the very first time the US has actually warned the Kiev regime against a military attack. This, at a time when the Ukraine extremists are in a state of bellicose frenzy and Poroshenko just promised to re-conqueor not only the Donetsk Airport, but all of the Donbass and even Crimea, show that for the very first time the US and Kiev are not on the same page.

Fourth, the USA has, for the first time, declared that if M2A was implemented, EU and US sanctions would be lifted. Interestingly, the Russians were not even interested in discussing the topic of sanctions.

So what does that all mean?

At this point, nothing much.Americans are terrible negotiators and in every single US-Russian negotiation over the conflict in the Ukraine the Russians completely out-negotiated their American “geostrategic partners” (the quasi-official ironic Russian term describing the West) every time. What typically happens, is that Kerry caves in, then comes back to Washington and changes his tune by 180 degree. The Russians know that and the Russian media stressed that in its analyses.

Still, the USA can zig and then zag as many times as they want, reality does not zag. If anything, the recent presence of Chinese and Indian troops on the Red Square showed that the notion of “isolating Russia” is a non-starter whether Kerry & Co. accept it or not.

Then, there was the rather interesting behavior of Nuland, who was with Kerry’s delegation, she refused to speak to the press and left looking rather unhappy.

Finally, a quick check of the Imperial Mouthpieces reveals that the Imperial Propaganda Department does not really know what to make of it all.

So what is going on, really?

Honestly, this one is too early to call and, as I said, the chances for yet another US “zag” are very high.

Still, what *might* be happening is that the Americans have finally (!) figured out a few basic facts:

Russia will not back down
Russia is ready for war
The Nazi-occupied Ukraine is collapsing
Most of the world supports Russia
The entire US policy towards Russia has failed

All of the above is rather obvious to any halfway competent observer, but for an Administration completely intoxicated with imperial hubris, crass ignorance and denial these are very, verypainful realities to catch up with. However, denying them might, at the end of the day, get the USA nuked. As the expression goes, if you head is in the sand, your ass is in the air.

Thus it is possible that what just happens is the first sign of a US sobering up and that what Kerry came to explore with Lavrov and Putin is some kind of face saving exit option. If that is so, then this is terminal news for Poroshenko as this means that the US has basically thrown in the towel in utter disgust with the freaks in power in Kiev.

Furthermore, this might be a sign that US military analysts have taken a very negative view of Kiev’s chances of success in their planned “Reconquista” of the Donbass. By going to Russia and officially endorsing M2A Kerry might be sending a message to Poroshenko: forget it, it ain’t happening!

Still, I would strongly caution against any premature optimism. I consider a US “zag” a quasi-certitude. My hope is that the “zag” will be limited in magnitude and that when it happens, it will be more about face-saving exit for Obama than about a denial of reality.

What is certain though, is that Russia has won yet another battle is this long war and that all the signs are pointing at the inevitable defeat of the Empire.

 

VICTORIA NULAND IS A CHENEY NEO-CON

Guest Post by David Warsh

TWO VIEWS OF RUSSIA

Perhaps the single most intriguing mystery of the Ukrainian crisis has to do with how the Foreign Service officer who served as deputy national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney for two years, starting on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, became the Obama administration’s point person on Russia in 2014. Victoria Nuland took office as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs a year ago this week. She became the “driving force” within the administration to take a tough line against Russia, according to Geoff Dyer of the Financial Times.

It was Nuland who in February was secretly taped, probably by the Russians, saying “F— the EU” for dragging its feet in supporting Ukrainian demonstrators seeking to displace its democratically-elected pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, two months after he rejected a trade agreement with the European Union in favor of one with Russia. She made a well-publicized trip to pass out food in the rebels’ encampment on Kiev’s Maidan Square in the days before Yanukovych fled to Moscow.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin said the other day, “Our Western partners, with the support of fairly radically inclined and nationalist-leaning groups, carried out a coup d’état [in Ukraine]. No matter what anyone says, we all understand what happened. There are no fools among us. We all saw the symbolic pies handed out on the Maidan,” Nuland is the pie-giver he had in mind

Before she was nominated to her current job, Nuland was State Department spokesperson under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Congressional firestorm over the attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.

So how did the Obama administration manage to get her confirmed – on a voice vote with no debate?  The short answer is that she was stoutly defended by New York Times columnist David Brooks and warmly endorsed by two prominent Republican senators, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona.

Clearly Nuland stands on one side of a major fault-line in the shifting, often-confusing tectonic plates of US politics.

A good deal of light was shed on that divide by John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, in an essay earlier this month in Foreign Affairs.  In “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Mearsheimer described the US ambitions to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit via expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the taproot of the crisis.  Only after Yanukovych fled Ukraine did Putin move to annex the Crimean peninsula, with its longstanding Russian naval base.

Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.

Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia — a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.

Why does official Washington think any different? (It’s not just the Obama administration, but much of Congress as well.)  Mearsheimer delineates a “liberal” view of geopolitics that emerged at the end of the Cold War, as opposed to a more traditional “realist” stance.  He writes,

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of NATO expansion took place in 1999, and brought the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland into the treaty. A second round in 2004 incorporated Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.  None but the tiny Baltic Republics shared a border with Russia. But in 2008, in a meeting in Bucharest, the Bush administration proposed adding Georgia and Ukraine.  France and Germany demurred, but the communique in the end flatly declared, “These countries will become members of NATO.”  This time Putin issued a clear rejoinder – a five-day war in 2008 which short-circuited Georgia’s application (though Georgia apparently continues to hope).

The program of enlargement originated with key members of the Clinton  administration, according to Mearsheimer.

 They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international politics and that a new, post-national order had replaced the realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the “indispensable nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like Western Europe.

In contrast, the realists who opposed expansion did so in the belief that Russia had voluntarily joined the world trading system and was no longer much of a threat to European peace. A declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional economy did not, they felt, need to be contained.

And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in Eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,” he said. “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.”

Policies devised in one administration have a way of hardening into boilerplate when embraced by the next. So thoroughly have liberals come to dominate discourse about European security that even the short war with Georgia has done little to bring realists back into the conversation. The February ouster of Yanukovych is either cited as the will of a sovereign people yearning to be free or, more frequently, simply ignored altogether.

The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about “the ideals” that motivate Western policy and how those ideals “have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power.” Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”

Nuland was present at the creation of the liberal view. She served for two years in the Moscow embassy, starting in 1991; by 1993 she was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. She directed a study on NATO enlargement for the Council on Foreign Relations in 1996, and spent three more years at State as deputy director for Former Soviet Union Affairs.

After a couple of years on the beach at the Council on Foreign Relations, President George W. Bush named her deputy ambassador to NATO in Brussels, in 2001. She returned to Brussels in the top job after her service to Cheney. When Obama was elected, she cooled her heels as special envoy to the Talks on Conventional Forces in Europe for two years until Clinton elevated her to spokesperson. Secretary of State John Kerry promoted her last year.

It seems fair to say that Putin has trumped Obama at every turn in the maneuvering over Ukraine – including last week, when the Russian president concluded a truce with the humbled Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko while leaders of the NATO nations fumed ineffectively at their annual summit, this year in Wales. Never mind the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, China, Israel. Even in Europe, the president’s foreign policy is in tatters.

Backing away from the liberal view is clearly going to be costly for some future presidential aspirant. The alternative is to maintain the expensive fiction of a new Cold War.

HAIR SALON NAPOLEONS IN THE YANKEE CAPITAL

Guest Post by Fred Reed

 

Pickle Boy Steps Up

Dill, Sweet, or Kosher?

March 21, 2014

Now, about this Crimea thing: What I figure is, the top part of the Feddle Gummint got dropped on its head when it was little, and the rest is just asleep, or might as well be. We look to be ruled by a bus-station of dumb-ass rich brats in a constant state of martial priapism. I can’t understand it. Out of three hundred million Americans, and lots of them went to school and can pretty much read, we get a slick minor pol out of Chicago for President and Pickle-Boy Kerry for Secretary of State, God knows why. Before that, we had Hillary, former First Housewife. Even god couldn’t explain that. And they throw their weight around just like they had some.

Now Obama’s threatening Russia about the Crimea. He may know where it is. I admit the possibility. We live in a strange world, and unexpected things can happen. What I can’t see is, why he thinks the Ukraine is Washington’s business. Last I heard, the Crimea was hung off into the Black Sea by the Isthmus of Perekop, like a hornet’s nest from a peach tree.

Why do we care about it? I guess if it gets to be part of Russia, Arkansas is next to go.

Maybe it moved, though. Continental drift is a reality. It could be anywhere by now, maybe in the Gulf of Mexico. And even if it ain’t, I guess we need a war with Russia over a place that’s none of our business. I mean, I don’t see how we can get along without one.

Now, about being dropped oin their heads: : Pkcle Boy has said of the Crimea, “You don’t just, in the 21st century, behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.” I reckon he hasn’t heard of Iraq either. The world is full of countries, and it’s hard to keep track of which ones you’ve wrecked.

I have a strategy. If we want to do those Russian rascals in, bring’em lower than dirt, we ought to arrange to have the American public elect their government. You know, on some kind of contract. Then they’d be ruled, like us, by a nursery full of pansies, milquetoasts, ethno-picks, growly feather-weights, diesel dykes, and sorry rich kids who never got into a school-yard fight. Russia would never recover.

We won’t either.

One thing you learn in the school yard is never call a tougher kid’s bluff. It might not be a bluff. Uh-oh. This Putin guy, I hear they call him Vlad the Hammer: I bet there’s a reason. And Pickle Boy looks to me like a bug on an anvil. It’s Little Lord Fauntleroy calling out Mike Tyson deep in the ‘hood. Where Mommy can’t help.

I see that Genghis Obama has sent a destroyer, the closest he can come I guess to a Golden Horde, to the Black Sea, grrr, woof. It’s going to conduct military exercises—push-ups, maybe. Now, that’s going to frighten Vlad. I guess a sense of humor is a good thing in a president. Maybe he can amuse Putin to death. I mean, by all the gods and little catfish, what does he think a tiny irritating boat like that is going to do—torpedo the Crimea? It doesn’t float, Barack. It’s stuck to the bottom. You can’t sink it.

To put it simply enough that even the hair-salon Napoleons in the Yankee Capital might be able to understand, but most likely  won’t, don’t make threats that the other guy knows you can’t follow through on. This idea is called “brains,” or sometimes “self-preservation.” Them days is gone when Washington could send the bathtub toys pretty much anywhere in the world and everybody would fall on his face and say, “Yassuh, bwana, yassuh.” Any third-grader in a country school in Georgia can see how things stand: Pickle Boy and the Jellyfish can (1) start a shooting war with Russia, or (2) back down and get laughed at by the whole world. Ain’t any other choices that I can see. God save us from little men with big egos and no judgement.

Now, I read a lot of history. It’s because I don’t have to spend all my time getting elected and posing for cameras and lying. A patch of history I’ve always liked is World War One. It teaches you how to get into a big war that doesn’t turn out like you think which is what usually happens in wars

You start by getting a toy president, or amateur Kaiser, who doesn’t know squat but you can’t tell him because that’s disloyal or, depending, racist. Besides, he can have you shot. Then you let the military get the upper hand—von Tirpitz, von Schlieffen, von Petraeus, von Hagel, they’re all the same. It helps if the amateur president or Kaiser wants to be a Wahhhhh! President or Kriegs Kaiser. You know how short men act. It would be less trouble to buy them a codpiece.

Then you surround him with incompetent toadies like von Bulow or Pickle Boy. Then you tell the public about German Exceptionalism and how God meant for Germany to rule and civilize the world and everybody hates Germany because it’s so wonderful so we need a bigger and bigger army. It works every time. It helps to tell people there’s a Serb under everybody’s bed, or an a Brit, or a commie or a Islam or terrorist or something. Pretty much anything will do. I figure it must get crowded under those beds.

The final part is to get yourself in trouble by having dam-fool mutual-defense treaties. You tell half the world that if anybody attacks anybody else, you are gonna jump in. Now the Kaiser had his own list of these traps. But Pickle Boy and the Obama Squad labor under the accreted load from years before.  So Washington has to defend Japan, Estonia, Korea, the Philippines, Georgia (bof’em), most all of Europe, Ukraine, and lots of other places nobody ever heard of or wants to..

It just might be smarter to let the rest of the world settle its own problems.

I’d like to set these milli-Talleyrands and micro-Metternichs down and see whether they know anything at all about, say, Russia. I mean, like where it came from, how it got to be what it is, and what it wants, and why it acts the way it does. I don’t mean hard questions, like what did Oleg nail to the gates of Constantinople. Could Relish Man tell me who Denikin, Kolchak, and Wrangel were? What was the NEP? Just simple Russian history. I’ll bet good money they wouldn’t have the tiniest underfed clue. But they can bark from under the sofa.

A wise old newspaper editor once told me: “A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. A reporter should know the difference.” Now, I wonder why that thought just came to mind.

I remember what my Uncle Hant told Burnside before the battle of Fredericksburg: “Jinral, if you got the brains of a goddamed retarded piss-ant, you won’t try to cross that river under all them guns.” You couldn’t take Hant anywhere in polite company. But he had a point.

WHERE THE F$#K IS OBAMA GETTING $1 BILLION TO GIVE TO THE NAZI UKRAINIANS?

Don’t you love bipartisanship when it comes to spending money we don’t fucking have? How can the American people be so lazy and willfully ignorant about what their corrupt politician leaders do on a daily basis. This Ukrainian episode again proves we are ruled by one PARTY. The Ukraine is a bankrupt, insolvent nation. Not our problem. If a country can’t pay its debts, tough shit. They were bankrupt and insolvent before their little CIA instigated revolution. They owe the Russians $20 billion for gas they have already used.

So Obama and the snakes in Congress on both sides of the aisle are singing kumbaya and acting like old pals as they fuck you again. Where the fuck are they getting $1 billion to give to Ukraine? And don’t be fooled by the bullshit about this being a loan. They are fucking insolvent and will never ever repay the loan. This is $1 billion pissed down the toilet.

In case you haven’t fucking noticed, this country adds $2.8 billion PER DAY to the National Debt. If we have to borrow $2.8 billion per day more than the previous day, how the fuck can Congress pretend we have ONE BILLION fucking dollars to give to these Nazis? In case you hadn’t noticed, the National debt now stands at $17.5 TRILLION. The “cooperation” between Obama and Congress has resulted in the debt rising by $200 Billion in the last month alone.

Obama and the Congressional scum are going to borrow $1 billion from future unborn generations and give it to Nazis in the Ukraine so they can pay Putin for his gas. Does that make sense to you? Is this how an empire in decline operates during its death rattle? Make no mistake about it, deficit spending is a tax on future generations, either through direct taxation or through indirect inflation. And the iGadget distracted masses don’t give a shit.

Anyone who thinks voting for some new corrupt scumbag will fix this, just observe the actions of Republicans and Democrats. Obama, Boehner, Kerry, McCain, Schumer, Feinstein, King and the rest of the traitors in Congress all agree to spend money they don’t have to prove we are still an Empire. There is no hope to change this shit at the ballot box.

I can’t wait until this fetid pustule of a nation has to eat at a banquet of consequences.



 

U.S. lawmakers say to vote on Ukraine aid package soon

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In a rare show of support for President Barack Obama, Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Wednesday they would work with the White House to address the crisis in Ukraine and vote on legislation offering financial aid soon.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said the Republican-led House will consider a $1 billion loan guarantee package for Ukraine and look at measures to “put significant pressure on Russia to stop the flagrant aggression to its neighbor in Ukraine.”

“The world community should stand united against this invasion, America should be leading and we’ll vote soon on legislation to aid the Ukrainian people,” Cantor told reporters.

House Speaker John Boehner also said that the House will work in a bipartisan way with Obama, a Democrat.

A bill to assist Ukraine, backed by both Republicans and Democrats, is also making its way through the U.S. Senate.

That legislation could be introduced as soon as this week, with a vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as early as March 11, said an aide to Senator Bob Corker, the top Republican on the committee.

Senators have been discussing ways to aid Ukraine’s new government and isolate Russia. Among other things, the Senate legislation would also authorize funds to provide at least $1 billion in loan guarantees to support Ukraine’s economy.

But the Republican leadership also had some harsh criticism of Obama’s foreign policy.

“With regard to Ukraine, the steps that have not been taken over the last three or four years, (by Obama) frankly, allowed Putin to believe that he could do what he’s doing without any reaction from us. But given where we are, we’re here, in a bipartisan way, trying to work with the president, to strengthen his hand,” Boehner said.

He said this includes the loan guarantee bill as well as consideration of a “toolbox” of sanctions authority that is similar to those used against Iran in recent years to persuade it to rein in its nuclear ambitions.

Boehner also criticized Obama for failing to approve liquefied natural gas exports, which could help lessen the dependence of European allies on Russian gas.

But since 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy has approved six proposals to export liquid natural gas, most recently on February 11. Supporters of U.S. energy exports have pounced on the crisis in Ukraine to pressure the Obama approval to speed approvals of LNG.

Cantor said it was important that the costs of the Ukraine loan guarantee be offset with other savings, but the House will proceed to a vote on the measure without a cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office to move it quickly.

Any dispute in Congress over how to pay for the measure could slow its progress.

GUESS THE LARGEST OIL PRODUCER IN THE WORLD

So Obama, Kerry and the nattering nabobs of NATO are going to show Russia who’s boss. Now that’s precious. I guess we’ll just ramp up that shale oil production by a few million barrels per day. Russia runs budget surpluses. They have been converting their USD holdings into gold. They are self sufficient on the energy front. They can shut off natural gas to Europe any time they choose. If they were to withhold a couple million barrels of oil per day from the world markets, oil prices would jump to $150 per barrel and destroy our economy.

Tell me again. Who’s in the driver seat here. Vlad the Impaler or Barack the Teleprompter Reader?

 

In accordance to an estimate held by IEA in 2011 , 63% of the world’s total oil output is obtained by the top ten largest producers which are given below:

 

 List of Top 10 Largest Oil Producers in the World 2013

 

Rank Country Production
(bbl/day)
Share of World’s output
(Percentage)
1. Russia Flag  Russia 10,730,000 12.65%
2. saudi arabia  Saudi Arabia 9,570,000 11.28%
3. UNITED STATES FLAG  United States 9,023,000 10.74%
4. Iran  Iran 4,231,000 4.77%
5. China flag  China 4,073,000 4.56%
6. Canada flag  Canada 3,592,000 3.90%
7. iraq  Iraq 3,400,000 3.75%
8. uae  United Arab Emirates 3,087,000 3.32%
9. mexico  Mexico 2,934,000 3.56%
10. kuwait  Kuwait 2,682,000 2.96%

 

Germany

  • Germany was the top importer of Russian oil in 2009, receiving approximately 700 thousand barrels per day (bbl/d). Germany’s economic relationship with Russia goes back to the aftermath of World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied East Germany and later supplied raw materials to the area, when both countries were members of the Warsaw Pact. The large Druzhba pipeline carries Russian oil to Germany, passing through Belarus and Poland.

Netherlands

  • The Netherlands was the second-largest importer of Russian oil in 2009, receiving more than 500,000 bbl/d. Furthermore, $62 billion dollars worth of trade was conducted between Russia and the Netherlands in 2008, making the Netherlands the second-largest overall trading partner with Russia. After Germany and the Netherlands, the next largest importers of oil are Poland and China. Curiously, the Netherlands was never part of the communist bloc, unlike many of the other top importers of Russian oil.

China

  • In 2009 China was the fourth-largest importer of Russian oil, behind Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. China’s 300,000 bbl/d made it by far the largest Asian importer of Russian oil, with Japan ranking a distant second. Chinese demand for Russian oil has recently increased, and as of 2011 the East Siberian-Pacific Ocean Pipeline is being developed to supply China with 30 million tons of oil per year.

United States

  • The United States is by far the largest importer of Russian oil in the Western Hemisphere. In 2009 the United States imported more than 200,000 bbl/d from Russia. Only six countries imported more oil from Russia that year. Russia has been suggested as an alternative source for U.S. oil, because of the political instability of the Middle East and the fact that the United States is, hands down, the world’s top oil consumer.

KERRY’S HYPOCRISY IS HILARIOUS

“One does not invade a country.”Ketchup Boy Kerry

Now that is a good one. Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria ……

The U.S. needs to keep their fucking nose out of Russia’s business. Let the fucking French and rest of the dainty EU debt saturated pussies save the Ukraine from big bad Putin.