You wrote (what I highlighted), "The Ruble (sic) has crashed. It's now worth one American penny."

The exchange USD/Rouble has changed in a range of ~20% over the last 2 years.

As I wrote: "The rest of your post is similar to this first sentence:

- Half true if you ignore all context; and

- The other half completely untrue."

Yes, the Rouble is worth about one American penny.

No, the Rouble hasn't crashed.

The context that in that time Russia has gone from a banking system based on SWIFT and a huge portion of dollars to SPSF (Russian version of SWIFT) and virtually no dollar transactions. This had a short term hit (albeit hard) in spring 2022.

Since then the USD/RUB exchange rate has been relatively stable. More importantly, the rate is less and less relevant as a measure of Russia's economic health, because Russia doesn't do much business with dollars anymore.

Russia's fleet of old tankers means the revenue from shipping Russian crude is no longer made by Western companies, but by Russian companies. They specifically bought those old tankers to keep from being shut out of the Western insurance market.

The IMF says Russia is on track for another year of growth.

A chart of Russian government revenues does not show much change over the last 5 or 10 years, except for improvement.

https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/government-revenues

So again, you make some points that might be half-true, but without the context that Russia is doing fine since we shut them out of the "Western Business Club."

This doesn't make me happy, as I live in Central Europe and very much enjoyed getting cheap Russian natural gas. The US-led sanctions on Russia are leading to deindustrialization in Germany, and real hardships there and elsewhere.

The "winners" of the sanctions are BRICS countries. This is the biggest "own goal" in US history, IMO. China and India were going to overtake us sooner or later. We've accelerated that process by 10 or 20 years.