On Tuesday, President Biden announced a ban on “all imports of Russian oil and gas and energy” in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Biden acknowledged that the ban is almost certain to drive up gas prices even further than they have risen in recent weeks, but blamed Moscow’s aggression for the harsh countermeasure. In response, the Kremlin has made forceful demands in the ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, insisting that any trade with Iran be exempt from sanctions recently imposed upon Russia. Patrick Wintour reports:

The Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov cited the “avalanche of aggressive sanctions [on Russia] that the West has started spewing out.” He went on: “We request that our U.S. colleagues . . . give us written guarantees at the minimum level of the secretary of state that the current [sanctions] process launched by the U.S. will not in any way harm our right to free, fully fledged trade and economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation with Iran.”

The West is almost certain to reject [Lavrov’s] demand since it would open a huge loophole in the sanctions regime. It would then be up to Moscow whether to veto the nuclear deal altogether.

Russia also has a short-term strategic interest in scuppering or postponing the deal. Iran produces more than two million barrels of oil a day, and if these supplies were able to reach the markets, the upward surge in prices would be slowed. Russia, a large-scale oil producer, wants to drive the oil price up to turn the screw on Western economies but also to boost its own revenues.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.