Should Montanans be more concerned about what China is up to right now, even in the midst of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Absolutely.

Helen Raleigh has a must-read piece at TheFederalist.com where she says China is using the Ukraine crisis to undermine the United States. I spoke with her about the piece on the radio in an interesting conversation that also touched on global oil and wheat prices.

Helen Raleigh: Another thing China did is to offer economic relief to Putin. Basically, China lifted the wheat import restrictions. Many people probably do not know that Russia is actually the world's largest wheat exporter. So China's been offering Putin economic relief to keep him going with his aggressions, and to keep the West focused on what Putin is doing, and draw attention away from what China is doing.

She also talked about how the Biden Administration shared intelligence with China in the false hope that China would somehow stop Putin from invading Ukraine, which of course didn't happen.

We also talked oil prices, and how White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki last week was downplaying the fact that "only" 10% of US oil imports come from Russia.

Helen Raleigh: We are financing Russia's aggression, we're financing their war crime. Putin's using every penny we pay for every drop of the Russian oil to finance his war crime in Ukraine, and we are complicit in that. Even though 10% sounds like a small number for United States...Russia is a much smaller economy and the energy sector is the most vital economic sector in Russia's economy...so you really want to punish Putin, try to deter his behavior, we need to hit where it hurts most. But for now, all the sanctions exempt the Russian energy industry.

Raleigh noted that energy contributes to 40% of the Russian federal government's annual budget.

In addition to being a senior contributor with The Federalist, Helen Raleigh has written several books about China including her latest- Backlash: How Communist China's Aggression Has Backfired.

Full audio of our chat with Helen Raleigh below:

By the way, Helen also mentioned another piece she wrote for The Federalist: Until Joe Biden Lets U.S. Oil Freely Flow, He’s Complicit In Putin’s War

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

 

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