Thomas Grove

Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said in a post on X that the sanctions exemption is a narrowly tailored short-term measure.

And he says that it shouldn't provide a lot of economic benefit to Russia in the long term.

This certainly shows us that the priority in Washington is to make sure that there's enough oil on the market to keep prices low.

And that's more important, I think, to Washington right now than preventing Russia from gaining additional revenues that are feeding its war right now in Ukraine.

But with that in mind, of course, there is a whole universe of sanctions on Russia and Russian oil.

And that goes from the banks to the companies involved to the people as well.

And those aren't being lifted.

But of course, if the war drags on, prices continue to rise, we have to look at those as well and see if those could be lifted too.

The growing number of strikes between Iran and all of its neighbors, including Israel and the U.S., have increasingly taken on a new target in this war, which is critical infrastructure.

This weekend, we really saw an uptick in attacks on critical infrastructure in the Gulf.

We saw Israel taking aim at Iran's oil depots, which has left clouds and fire in the air, black rain that's being caused in Tehran.

And most recently, we've seen an Iranian attack near a Bahrain oil refinery that has left 32 civilians injured.

And then over the weekend, we saw a very new critical phase of this conflict, which is countries going for each other's desalination plans.

And this is very important because the region depends on desalinated water for its drinking water, for its economies basically to grow and function.

Now, these countries have been stockpiling water for years.

They have critical reserves of this stuff.

But some of the smaller nations like Bahrain, for example, which was struck over the weekend,

They don't have huge reserves.

In fact, some analysts say that even over a number of days, those stocks could be drawn down and you could see a crisis in the country.

Putin really used all the levers of the state to make the country as effective as possible in fighting the war. On the economic side, they basically just ramped up production of every major weapons system that they possibly could.