The U.S. and Europe have been scrambling for ways to stop financing Vladimir Putin’s war machine without sending their economies into recession. The latest idea, advanced at the G-7 summit this week, is an oil price cap. This will work as well as most price-control gambits, which is to say it probably won’t.
Despite Western efforts, Kremlin oil export revenues have increased since the Ukraine invasion. The U.S. has banned Russian oil imports, and the European Union recently agreed to phase them out this year with exceptions for pipeline deliveries to Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
