However, the most pivotal gambit currently being played by Russia, as led by President Putin, is its amassing of gold. It is a gambit in which the West is even now hopelessly trapped. In chess, the situation in which the West now languishes is called “time trouble (Kalinchenko 2014)” thus it is a matter of time before the game ends quite predictably. Perhaps the battlefield equivalent of this gambit are the “cauldrons” into which the Ukrainian Army was itself checkmated by the Novorossiyan freedom fighters.
The Western gambit in the Ukraine, on the other hand, has led to unremitting failure. Yet the West attempts another poorly thought-out strategy aimed at destroying the Russian economy, which has taken the form of lowering oil and gas prices, the key drivers of Russia’s revenue. However, this new strategy has led the West into yet more “time trouble (cauldron)” from which it will never emerge. [...]
Currently, the US Government intentionally suppresses the price of gold via a special department called the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), with the intended aim of stabilizing the dollar. This suppression has, in fact, become law in the US (Kalinchenko 2014): Right now the West spends much of its efforts and resources to suppress the prices of gold and oil. Thereby, on the one hand, to distort the existing economic reality in favor of the US dollar and on the other hand, to destroy the Russian economy, refusing to play the role of obedient vassal of the West.
As a result, both gold and oil are artificially undervalued, while the dollar flies high against other currencies and the aforementioned commodities. This brings us to Putin’s final gambit. In short, President Putin is quietly selling Russian oil and gas for “physical” gold. And though he still accepts the over-valued dollar in payment, these dollars are then immediately exchanged for under-valued physical gold. This is where the trap becomes “magnetic” and pulls in a West that begins slowly to understand what’s happening, but can do literally nothing to change its fate. As Kalinchenko states: Thus, the Western world, built on the hegemony of the petrodollar, is in a catastrophic situation. In which it cannot survive without oil and gas supplies from Russia. And Russia is now ready to sell its oil and gas to the West only in exchange for physical gold! The twist of Putin's game is that the mechanism for the sale of Russian energy to the West only for gold now works regardless of whether the West agrees to pay for Russian oil and gas with its artificially cheap gold, or not.
So, the US artificially props up the dollar and the Russians use the artificially high dollar to buy the artificially lowered gold and then sells its oil to all other Western players for physical gold. What Russia has, in fact done, is reopened the “gold window,” closed by Nixon in 1971 without asking for Washington’s permission. Kalinchenko sums that: This truly brilliant economic combination by Putin puts the West led by the United States in a position of a snake, aggressively and diligently devouring its own tail. [...]
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and, perhaps, a host of others, have had their gold reserves renditioned to the US, so that the US might attempt to stall the inevitable.
Ukraine: Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated by Natylie Baldwin & Kermit E. Heartsong (2015)