The sanctions policy has worked brilliantly, but not as planned in Brussels. The Hungarian Prime Minister has been saying this for a long time, but now the mainstream Western press is also waking up - the news portal Felvidék.ma wrote about it.

The effectiveness of the sanctions against Russia has been the subject of serious debate from the beginning, but anyone who looks at world events with an open mind can see that the EU scored a huge own goal with them, and on the other hand, their negative impact mostly affects the population, because economic life its dominant actors, and even the individual member states themselves, are quietly looking for and finding the loopholes modestly hiding behind the main gate of strict sanctions.

This eye-rolling hypocrisy also applies to banning Russian oil imports. Most recently, Világgazdaság pointed out that the West buys a staggering amount of fuel produced from cheap Russian oil. Reuters put it this way:

    "in the first half of the year, Western countries bought fuel produced from Russian oil for about two billion dollars".

They do all this with the trick of first processing Russian oil in another country, such as Turkey, which essentially legally circumvents sanctions against Russia. According to the news, Turkey also receives oil from the Russians at a discount of 5-20 dollars per barrel.

Quoting Politico, a Russian newspaper wrote that "the countries of the European Union and Great Britain, which have overwhelmed Russia with all kinds of restrictions, have themselves found loopholes to buy cheap petroleum products from Russian oil without violating the sanctions." It is just icing on the cake that, despite all this, of course only the companies and traders profit from the business, while

for the average European consumer, the retail price of petroleum products does not decrease at all.

So we have to agree with the much-voiced claim that sanctions do work. What has been said above gives only a small slice of how: the Russians thank you, they have it, the companies that find the loopholes, multinationals as well, but the little man can complain about their burdens...

Source: Felvidék.ma

Cover image: MTI/EPA/Martin Divisek