By Michael Snyder, ZeroHedge, 3/30/22 (emphasis in original)

Russia has just made some moves that are going to change the global financial system forever.  When the conflict in Ukraine originally erupted, the U.S. immediately attempted to crash the value of Russia’s currency.  Those attempts were successful for a few days, but now the value of the ruble relative to the U.S. dollar is almost all the way back to where it was before the start of the war.  This has absolutely stunned many of the experts, because they thought that U.S. sanctions would absolutely cripple Russia.  So what happened?  Well, it turns out that the Russians have made some very savvy moves that have turned the tables on the Biden administration.

For one thing, Russia has started to demand payment in rubles when it sells natural gas to non-friendly nations.  A lot of countries in western Europe are quite upset about this, but they really have no choice, because they are exceedingly dependent on Russian gas.  So from this point forward, western powers are actually going to be forced to help prop up the value of the ruble…

Russia wants “unfriendly countries” to pay for Russian natural gas in rubles. That’s a new directive from President Vladimir Putin as he attempts to leverage his country’s in-demand resources to counter a barrage of Western sanctions.

“I have decided to implement … a series of measures to switch payments — we’ll start with that — for our natural gas supplies to so-called unfriendly countries into Russian rubles,” Putin said in a televised government meeting, adding that trust in the dollar and euro had been “compromised” by the West’s seizure of Russian assets.

Secondly, the Russians have decided that U.S. dollars will no longer be accepted as payment for anything that they sell to other nations.  Pavel Zavalny, the head of the Russian parliament, says that U.S. currency “has lost all interest for us”…

Much more interesting was Zavalny’s main point, even though it has been mostly overlooked. If other countries want to buy oil, gas, other resources or anything else from Russia, he said, “let them pay either in hard currency, and this is gold for us, or pay as it is convenient for us, this is the national currency.”

In other words, Russia is happy to accept your national currency — yuan, lira, ringgits or whatever — or rubles, or “hard currency,” and for them that no longer means U.S. dollars, it means gold.

“The dollar ceases to be a means of payment for us, it has lost all interest for us,” Zavalny added, calling the greenback no better than “candy wrappers.”

This is huge, but it isn’t being discussed much by the corporate media in the United States.

The Russians aren’t just saying that they do not recognize U.S. dollars as the reserve currency of the world any longer.

That would be bad enough.

At this point, they are actually saying that they will no longer accept U.S. dollars as a form of payment at all.

Wow.

Thirdly, the central bank in Russia has fixed the value of the ruble to the price of gold for at least the next three months…

The Russian central bank will restart buying gold from banks and will pay a fixed price of 5000 roubles ($52) per gramme between March 28 and June 30, the bank said on Friday.

But you won’t hear about this on CNN or MSNBC.

This is a move that could potentially change everything.

Once upon a time, the value of the U.S. dollar was tied to gold, and that helped the U.S. dollar become the dominant currency on the entire planet.

But then Nixon took us off the gold standard in the early 1970s, and things have gone haywire ever since.

Now Russia has linked the value of the ruble to the price of gold, and many believe that this is really going to shake things up…

“I am reminded of what the U.S. did in the middle of the Great Depression. For the next 40 years, gold’s price was pegged to the U.S. dollar at $35. There is a precedent for this. It leads me to believe that Russia’s intention would be for the value of the ruble to be linked directly to the value of gold,” Gainesville Coins precious metals expert Everett Millman told Kitco News. “Setting a fixed price for rubles per gram of gold seems to be the intention. That’s pretty important when it comes to how Russia could seek funding and manage its central bank financing outside of the U.S. dollar system.”

Others believe that this move will create great instability in the global financial system.

For example, Tom Luongo is warning that the following could soon happen…

1. At $1550 per ounce the first order effect here is that is implies a RUB/USD rate of around 75. Incentivizing those holding RUB to continue and those needing them to bid up the price from current levels.
2. This creates a positive incentive loop to bring the ruble back to pre-war levels.  Then after that market effects take over as ruble demand becomes structural, based on Russia’s trade balance.
3. Once that happens and the RUB/USD falls below 75, then the USD price of gold rises structurally draining the paper gold markets and collapsing the financial system based on leveraged/hypothecated gold.  Now we’re into the arb. phase @Lukegromen postulated w/ 1000bbls/oz.

Time will tell if Luongo is right or if he is wrong.

But without a doubt, things have not played out the way that Biden administration officials were hoping.

They had hoped that U.S. sanctions would crush the ruble, the Russian financial system and the entire Russian economy.

Instead, the Russians have been able to successfully prop up the value of the ruble and have made moves that directly threaten the dominance of the U.S. dollar.

No matter what happens with the ceasefire talks, I expect the United States and Russia to continue this economic conflict for the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, that will be bad for both of our nations.

And as history has shown, economic conflicts have a way of becoming shooting wars way too often.  Needless to say, we definitely do not want a shooting war with Russia.

Leaders on both sides should be attempting to find ways to achieve peace and to fix the tremendous damage that has already been done.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to want to continue to escalate matters, and that should deeply alarm all of us

https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/25/ted-postol-what-you-really-need-to-know-about-the-threat-of-nuclear-war/

By Julia Conley, CommonDreams, 3/28/22

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has left Americans on edge, according to a recent poll which found a majority of people in the U.S. are worried that the war has made the impending use of nuclear weapons more likely.

Nearly three-quarters of respondents told the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that the invasion has increased the likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used anywhere in the world.

Eighty-five percent of people surveyed said they were concerned that the U.S. could be drawn into the conflict, including 47% of people who said they were “extremely or very concerned” about this scenario, which would amount to a conflict between the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles…

Read full article here.

First is an excerpt from an article by Ben Aris at Intellinews, which provides a few more details about the proposal by Ukraine that came out of yesterday’s negotiations.

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 3/29/22

The Ukraine delegation has offered a compromise in the form of a written commitment from Kyiv to abandon plans to regain Crimea and Sevastopol using military force, Medinsky said after the talks were over.

“These guarantees of security do not cover the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol, which means that Ukraine abolishes its intent to return Crimea and Sevastopol military, claiming that this would only be possible via negotiations,” Medinsky said as cited by Tass. “Of course, this does not correspond to our position in any way, but Ukraine has formulated its approach.”

The proposals would include a 15-year consultation period on the status of Russian-annexed Crimea, and could come into force only in the event of a complete ceasefire, the Ukrainian negotiators said…

…The comments from the Russia delegation suggest that the issue of the Donbas region is not resolved. The Ukrainian proposal on Crimea amounts to an offer to “agree to disagree” over the Crimea, but offers guarantees that Kyiv will not use force to try to regain the peninsula.

Resolving the disagreements over Donbas remains a sticking point. Russia’s Donbas and Crimea demands are “not realistic,” Turkish presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin said in an interview with CNN on March 27.

Russia’s request to recognise the annexation of Crimea and independence of Donbas is a “very maximalist” position, Kalin said, adding that giving away territory is “off the table” and that Russia “should really come up with some other ideas.”

“These are the red lines for the Ukrainians in the Crimea and Donbas, and rightly so, because they pertain directly to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. We have not recognised the annexation of Crimea as, like the rest of the world, even China has not recognised the annexation of Crimea …They [the Russians] should really come up with some other ideas,” he told CNN on the sidelines of the Doha Forum.

Next is an excerpt from reporting by The Bell, which provides some insight from an insider in the Russian government:

The talks in Istanbul on Tuesday lasted about four hours. For Ukraine, it was important to put forward proposals Russia could accept, a source familiar with Moscow’s position told The Bell. Russia was prepared to move toward a genuine agreement because any further military advance would mean fighting in major cities and a repeat of the destruction of Mariupol, the source believes.

The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said Ukraine’s written proposals would be submitted to President Vladimir Putin prior to a discussion at Foreign Minister level. A presidential meeting between Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy would take place only when a peace treaty was ready, he said.

It is assumed that any ceasefire would include agreements on a neutral, nuclear-free Ukraine with security guarantees. Further clauses would ensure mutual respect for languages and cultures. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he would like to broker similar agreements with all Ukraine’s other neighbors: Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Belarus and Moldova.

“Reduction of military activity”

Russia’s deputy minister of defense, Alexander Fomin, made the biggest announcement of the day – about a “dramatic, manifold reduction in military activity” around Kyiv and Chernihiv.

On the one hand, this is merely a statement of the fact – over the past week Russian forces have made no serious advances in these areas and the Ministry of Defense stated Friday that Russian forces will concentrate their resources on “liberating Donbas”. Medinsky later clarified that the Ministry of Defense statement did not amount to a ceasefire.

However, this is the first time the Russian military has made such a statement – and followed it up with action on the ground. Within an hour of Fomin’s comments, a U.S. intelligence source said the U.S. was indeed observing the partial withdrawal of Russian forces near Kyiv and Chernihiv.

Any decision on a complete ceasefire has been postponed. It seems that both sides feel time is on their side and hope to occupy territory that can bolster their negotiating positions, the source close to the talks told The Bell.