President Joe Biden’s feckless, weak leadership in foreign affairs and his misguided “green” energy policies are killing innocent women and children by financing Vladimir Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine. Biden’s ideologically driven energy policies are also wrecking the U.S. economy, but that’s for another column — as is our analysis of how Hunter Biden’s activities have compromised his father. That’s our upcoming piece: “Never Underestimate the Power of Blackmail.”

This week, our research shows how Biden’s energy policies are financing the horrific genocide and war crimes Putin is perpetrating against the Ukrainian people. According to the Ukrainian government, more than 10,000 of its citizens — mostly women, children and elderly — have been brutally killed by Russian invaders. More than 6.5 million have become displaced within the country. Over 10 million are refugees.

Property and infrastructure damage are already in the hundreds of billions. Hundreds of Ukrainian civilians have been tortured before being murdered, and their bodies found with their hands bound behind their backs. Worse is sure to come as Putin’s forces reposition to seize control over sovereign Ukrainian territory in the eastern part of their country and along the Black Sea coast.

A U.S. president should lead a strong, positive stand against vicious totalitarian despotism. Biden ought to be exhorting the “Free World” to do everything possible to help the Ukrainian people win the war being waged against them by Putin’s Russian army. But Biden’s fight against fossil fuel is apparently more important than Ukrainian lives and freedom.

Since the invasion, despite seven rounds of “financial sanctions” against Russia, Putin and the oligarchs who support him, Russian petroleum products and natural gas continue to fuel Putin’s genocide. The European Union admits about 45% of the bloc’s natural gas imports, and 25% of its oil imports, come from Russia. This means our “Euro-allies” have sent Putin nearly $40 billion for Russian energy since his invasion began.

Here’s how Biden’s energy policies became so deadly. On his first day in office, Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have provided 830,000 barrels of Canadian crude oil per day to U.S. refineries. We also have enough untapped oil to make Saudi Arabia envious. Alaska’s north slope has 40 to 50 billion barrels of untapped oil, and the Nanushuk Formation is a “super basin,” capable of producing tens of thousands of barrels of oil daily. In the western quarter of North and South Dakota and eastern Montana, the Williston Basin, known as the Bakken, is a largely underutilized oil basin with up to 7 billion barrels of untapped oil.

With all this untapped petroleum and natural gas available, why aren’t oil producers extracting it? Simple answer: They don’t trust Biden. Oil investors and executives are afraid as soon as they invest the millions necessary to tap these and other promising locations, Biden will succumb to pressure from the eco-loons who control him and pull the plug on their projects, as he did with the XL pipeline. Has anyone asked the “Green New Dealers” how burning foreign oil is better for the environment?

Biden’s impediments to U.S. domestic oil production are killing Ukrainians. U.S. domestic exports would allow European nations to wean themselves from Russian oil and natural gas and starve Putin of cash he needs for weapons and manpower to kill Ukrainians.

The day Biden took office, America was energy independent. Now, because of his pathetically insane energy policies, our spineless, witless and potentially corrupt president is releasing millions of barrels from our Strategic Petroleum Reserves and going hat in hand, begging totalitarians in Iran and Venezuela to sell us more oil to relieve our “pain at the pump.” Meanwhile, Putin continues his Biden-funded genocide.

COPYRIGHT 2022 OLIVER L. NORTH AND DAVID GOETSCH