We all know how scary wars can get. If you aren’t aware, there’s a war happening in Ukraine, as you’re reading this. Why is this war happening? Well, if you didn’t know Russia was a whole empire at one point in time. Then, it broke apart and was divided into countries. Russia felt like after it broke, they still owned Ukraine. Just to sum it up, Russia is fighting for land. This is affecting quite a lot of places. I’ll be talking about how it’s affecting the U.S. alone. 

Now, you’re probably wondering how this could affect the U.S. For one thing, removing Russia from SWIFT could have quite a big impact on us. What is SWIFT? According to USA Today SWIFT stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. 

SWIFT is a global messaging system that connects thousands of financial institutions around the world. It doesn’t control the money going from country to country, but it does, collect its information.

How does this affect the U.S.? It affects the U.S. because our banks are the most frequent SWIFT users to communicate with Russian banks, which could lead the U.S. to lose a lot of money and products like minerals and more, according to CNN. 

What else could affect the U.S? If you haven’t seen the news, Biden wants to ban oil that comes from Russia.  Gas prices are $5 here in Maryland, and up to $7 in California according to LA Times. If Biden continues with the oil ban process, the prices of gas will continue to rise and some people won’t be able to afford these prices considering the minimum wage in Maryland alone is around $11 an hour while gas is up to $5-7.  

It’s not only gas, energy prices could rise up too. Why are all these things in danger of rising? Russia is the third biggest supplier of foreign petroleum for the U.S. according to the U.S. Energy Information Association. 

Not only that, but back in 2019, Russia exported $13 billion worth of mineral fuels to the U.S., more than half of other imports coming from other places. 

This could also affect food supplies. According to The Hills, farmers are embracing a high price rise in fertilizer. Russia is a low-cost producer of fertilizer. Although this was a problem before this war, it can get much worse. 

As we can see, this Russia v. Ukraine war is affecting us in an economic way. If the United States and Russia cut ties, we’d probably go into another Great Depression due to the loss of materials and the number of rising prices of items. What would happen if we went into the Great Depression? Honestly, every human would lose their money.