Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
From a conversation with Edward Luttwak published by the Wall Street Journal in March 2020: Ranching has been more than an investment. It has helped him understand the fundamental weakness of post-Soviet Russia. “Between Vladivostok and the North Korean border,…
News from S&P Global Platts on the upcoming OPEC+ meeting (online): Saudi Arabia and Russia… have insisted that they will only participate [in an agreement to reduce oil output] if the US also agrees to production cuts. A condition unlikely…
Bloomberg ran this column by Julian Lee on Sunday: Here’s what Saudi Arabia needs to do. At the virtual meeting of oil producers… it should give its counterparts — including those who don’t show up — a clear binary choice…
Here’s Sophie Pinkham for The Nation, reviewing The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia by Anya Bernstein: Aleksandr Bogdanov, a prominent early Bolshevik and science fiction writer, investigated the rejuvenating properties of blood transfusions in the…
A fund manager running a private equity fund out of Luxembourg writes: Regarding what happened on the ground, one can assume that Saudi Arabia had prepared a plan A and a contingency plan before entering the talks. Plan A was…
Reuters sheds a new light on the Druzhba contamination case: The substance that brought one of Russia’s longest oil pipelines to a halt in April was carbon tetrachloride, a lethal chemical meant to be tightly controlled by an international agreement,…
La Fontaine’s fox, the connoisseur of grapes, was all-French, as it were – “Gascon, some say Norman” – and in keeping with his roots, he preferred wisecracking to whining, which his creator appreciated. American shale oil, sweet as a rule,…
During a televised Q&A session in April 2013, Vladimir Putin responded to a journalist’s claim that Gazprom had mistakenly written off the shale gas revolution as a short-term fluke: So it’s hard to say whether Gazprom missed the ‘shale-gas revolution’…
In the previous post, I said I couldn’t recall anything like the recent contamination incident at Transneft in the past twenty-plus years. I wasn’t exaggerating, it turns out – according to Vitaly Yermakov of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies…
Last Sunday, Forbes wrote about Russian oil producers being forced to cut production, not because of the OPEC+ deal but due to an unforeseen disruption: After buyers in Europe discovered that $2.7 billion worth of oil they had purchased from…
Two teasers for a start. A new hotel on the outskirts of Moscow: It is even further out of town and stands next to an enormous strip club. Several of my fellow guests are wearing T-shirts with a picture of…
Bloomberg reported from Moscow yesterday: Rising oil prices have been a relief for Russia’s finances, but they’ve given the Kremlin a headache in the form of higher gasoline prices, hitting already-struggling consumers and fueling inflation. Struggling to control the increases,…