Russia's central bank just cut interest rates to 14% — down from a wartime peak of 21% — while our own Federal Reserve sits frozen, and working Americans are the ones paying for the failure of the sanctions snake oil we were sold.

The quarter-point cut, reported by the Associated Press, marks a slowing pace of easing but a cut all the same. Bank of Russia Governor Elvira Nabiullina cited temporary fuel-price shocks from Ukrainian drone attacks on refineries as the main inflation driver, not structural collapse. Annual inflation sits at 5.9% — hardly hyperinflation — and unemployment remains low. The bank's target is 4%, and they're moving toward it. Meanwhile, the Fed can't find its way out of a paper bag.

Here's what matters: we were told — by every think-tanker, cable-news general, and bipartisan hawk — that sanctions would crater the Russian economy. The AP itself concedes the economy "held up better than many expected despite Western sanctions." Oil exports kept the budget afloat. Military orders kept factories humming. Growth has slowed to a forecast 0.4% this year, yes, but the sky didn't fall. The business lobby is complaining about borrowing costs, and Alexander Shokhin, head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, warned of potential "autumn bankruptcies" if rates stayed high. That's a normal policy debate — the kind a functioning economy has. Not the rubble the foreign-policy class promised.

SFGATE, republishing the same AP copy, included Nabiullina's fuller explanation: recent price spikes "was largely provoked by the situation in the fuel market," and as that stabilizes, "inflation expectations are likely to go down." In other words, Russia's central bank is managing trade-offs like any other — between growth and price stability — not presiding over a smoldering crater.

So what did the sanctions accomplish? Not the regime change the Blob wanted. Not the economic collapse they promised. What they did accomplish was disruption — of global energy markets, of food supply chains, of the prices you pay at the pump and the grocery store. Every round of economic warfare Washington wages overseas boomerangs back into the wallets of ordinary Americans. And the architects of these policies face zero accountability for being wrong.

The same bipartisan establishment that backed these sanctions is now demanding blank checks for every foreign cause that comes across the wire. Russia's economy is still standing, cutting rates, making policy adjustments. Our economy is the one stuck in the mud, with a Federal Reserve that can't move and a political class that won't stop spending on everyone except the people who fund it.

The question isn't whether Russia is thriving — it's not. The question is why Americans keep paying for interventions that don't work, pushed by people who are never held to account when they fail.