ALL INPredictions
Last updated Nov 29, 2025
Prediction
Chamath
← Back to hostEpisode
Chamath @ 00:23:23Right
politicseconomy
Following early March 2022, the United States and its allies will continue to add further rounds of economic sanctions on Russia beyond those already announced on Russian crude and other sectors; the sanctions regime will materially intensify over the ensuing months of 2022.
And just to speak on this other point, we have only just begun. Meaning just today, as we started the pod, uh, Biden came out with an incremental new set of sanctions on Russian crude. So we're not at the even in the beginning. We're at the beginning of the beginning.View on YouTube
Explanation

Evidence shows that after early March 2022, the U.S. and its allies repeatedly added new rounds of sanctions on Russia and significantly tightened the overall regime during the rest of 2022.

  • United States: In addition to early‑March orders banning U.S. imports of Russian fossil fuels and certain other goods (EO 14066 and 14068), the Biden administration issued Executive Order 14071 on April 6, 2022, which prohibited all new U.S. investment in Russia and empowered Treasury to ban broad categories of services to Russian persons—a major escalation beyond the initial crude‑oil measures.(en.wikipedia.org) Congress followed with laws statutorily banning imports of Russian energy products and suspending normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus on April 8, 2022.(en.wikipedia.org) These moves materially widened the scope and bite of U.S. sanctions through 2022.

  • European Union and allies: After the first three sanction packages in late February / early March 2022, the EU adopted successive 4th to 9th packages between March 15 and December 16, 2022, each adding new sectoral and individual measures; the Council itself characterizes these as continuously extended and increasing in severity.(en.wikipedia.org) The 5th package (April 8, 2022) added an EU‑wide ban on Russian coal imports, barred Russian vessels from EU ports and most Russian and Belarusian road freight operators from the EU, imposed further export bans on high‑tech goods, and fully blocked four more major Russian banks.(consilium.europa.eu) The 6th package (June 3, 2022) introduced a phased embargo on Russian seaborne crude and refined oil and cut additional key banks from SWIFT, directly targeting one of Russia’s largest revenue sources.(consilium.europa.eu) Later packages, including the 8th (October 6, 2022), expanded import bans (e.g., steel, machinery, vehicles, chemicals) and export controls and began implementing the G7 oil‑price‑cap mechanism.(finance.ec.europa.eu)

  • G7 price cap: On December 5, 2022, the G7 and EU brought into force a coordinated price‑cap regime on Russian seaborne crude oil (and later refined products), restricting access to Western shipping and insurance if Russian oil was sold above the cap.(enlargement.ec.europa.eu) This was another significant tightening of the sanctions architecture relative to early March.

Taken together, these steps show that throughout the ensuing months of 2022 the U.S. and its allies not only continued adding sanctions rounds but also escalated them into a broad, multi‑sectoral regime hitting energy, banking, trade, and investment far more severely than the initial measures on Russian crude alone. That matches Chamath’s prediction that early March 2022 represented only “the beginning of the beginning” and that the sanctions regime would materially intensify over the rest of 2022.