I've seen widespread daily coverage in mainstream media (gloatingly) reports that the sanctions are hurting the Russian economy. The reports usually refer to the declining rate of exchange between the US dollar and Euros with the Russian ruble. Hudson explains why these exchange rates are irrelevant to the new Russian economic realities, and suggests that the effort to isolate Russia from Europe will backfire on the Empire's neoconservative directors.
...the result of these changes is the opposite of what American strategy was based on for the last half-century, the idea of dividing and conquering Eurasia by setting Russia against China, by isolating Iran, by preventing India, the Near East, and other Asian countries from joining together to create some kind of alternative to the dollar area. In fact, the American sanctions and the new Cold War policy of the neocons are driving these Asian countries together, in association with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as an alternative to NATO, and the BRICS are trying to make an alternative to dealing with the dollar area and with the IMF and the World Bank that represent U.S. policy.
So, regarding Europe, America's insistence that it join this new Cold War policy by imposing sanctions on Russia, and especially by blocking Russian oil and gas imports, is--aggravated the Eurozone's austerity, and it's just turning it into a dead zone.
