“We must accept finite disappointment, but must never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Clearly, for Russia, it was a chronicle of an announced debacle. They invaded the largest country in Europe with barely 150,000 soldiers, while the USSR mobilized nearly a million men in 1968 to occupy a country (Czechoslovakia) that represented only one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory and a quarter of its population at that time. Stalin would…
It is necessary to conjugate the striking force of OPEC in the past. This group of countries that used to meet in Vienna, deciding unanimously to reduce their production and using their monopoly to drive up oil prices to the detriment of nations and continents eager to consume it, no longer impresses much. How distant…
The oil price cap decided a few days ago by the G7 is an original, unprecedented measure to be taken very seriously. The member countries of this exclusive club will therefore refuse to buy its oil from Russia at a price that will exceed a certain level which will be fixed later. Surely Russia…
They were all grossly wrong, those who predicted a collapse in Russian oil production. Putin effectively defied all forecasts because, with 10.8 million barrels/day (mb/d) pumped last July, Russian oil production is almost at the level of 11 mb/d last January, i.e. before the war. In fact, it has been three months since this…
China has been deeply shocked by the butchery that the Russian economy has suffered. The leaders of China – at every level – are terrified to fall victim to such strangulation. The West has steadfastly realised that its almighty power of globalisation is – by all accounts – a weapon that it alone wields.…
It’s been a quite a while since Putin’s Russia stopped investing in top-of-the-range global securities, namely US Treasury Bonds. Clearly worried about freeing itself from the West’s tutelage, Russia now has only 3.7 billion dollars of US debt compared to the 177 it had in 2010. Also, Russia’s central bank possesses wealth in the…
In terms of sanctions against it, Russia is particularly vulnerable when it comes to technology. Its dependency goes back a long time, to the Soviet era in fact because – despite the USSR exporting more machines and machine tools than it imported numerically-speaking – the value of these imports exceeded 7 and sometimes even…
We are living in turbulent times and our world can attest, since a few days ago, to the equivalent of a declaration of war taking place on the oil market. Saudi Arabia, that is suffering a fall of more than 20% of its exports to China (its biggest client) due to the coronavirus epidemic,…