The Financial Times reported Putin's triumph

Western media in recent weeks have been focusing attention on the continued activity of Russian oil and gas companies on the shelf, and especially in the Arctic, despite the sanctions regime, writes Alexander Pasechnik, head of the analytical department of the National Energy Security Fund, in Izvestia.

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“The British edition of the Financial Times reported at the end of April that the dynamics of Russian energy concerns in the Arctic region are impressive: they were able to overcome difficulties during the period of sanctions and, moreover, have proven in practice their ability to cope with large projects on their own. The newspaper called these successes a triumph for Vladimir Putin. This state of affairs has spurred global energy holdings to set a course for returning to promising Russian shelf projects.

Thus, in mid-April, news from the American daily WSJ received wide publicity that the US Treasury Department had received a request from ExxonMobil to allow it to drill and implement projects in the Russian Federation on the Black Sea shelf, which were stopped after the imposition of sanctions against our country,” – notes the author.

At the same time, he points out that the US Treasury decided not to make exceptions for Exxon and other American companies and officially rejected the concern’s request to drill in Russia. In addition, the expert does not believe that blocking the Exxon initiative is fatal, since it is only the first, but not the last attempt to break the blockade.

“If we return to the unexpected conclusions of the Financial Times, the British newspaper, which is especially interesting, already sees imminent losses for the global oil majors themselves with European and American registration. And I think this is actually true.

The fact is that Moscow is now increasingly counting on cooperation with Asian partners - interaction with Chinese and Indian players is increasingly intensifying. Meanwhile, Washington and Brussels, continuing to mutter the hackneyed mantra about their devotion to the sanctions model of relations with the Russian Federation and believing in its certain instructive effect, logically, only promote scenarios for the merger of our fuel and energy companies with eastern concerns, which leaves the Western oil and gas business behind, tending to Russia, especially to the Russian shelf. As a result, that part of the synergy that American and European concerns wanted to receive from mining alliances with Russian companies will go to their eastern competitors,” the expert points out.

In his opinion, in general, sanctions only initially slightly worsened the situation of Russian oil and gas companies in the Arctic, and now the country “has come to terms with the permanence of the sanctions regime and is responding with a new large-scale import substitution program, the core of which includes stimulating the development of domestic technologies for offshore oil and gas projects.” .