The warfare relaunches Moscow: «Huge demand for our vitality assets» | EUROtoday

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For us the Strait of Hormuz stays open, it’s closed solely to enemies”, specifies Yurij Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy advisor. Confirming Moscow’s inclusion in the small group of “pleasant nations” to which the Iranians have allowed commercial navigation in the sea corridor at the center of the conflict between Tehran, Israel and the United States.

From the beginning of the war in the Middle East, Russia appeared among the countries that could have obtained the greatest advantages: «The threat of a split in NATO, the easing of sanctions, the serious energy crisis in Europe, the suspension of aid and loans to Ukraine – Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk listed in recent days -: all this seems like Putin’s dream plan».

According to Argus Media data reported yesterday by the Bloomberg agency, the global oil rally has allowed prices of the Russian Urals variety to rise to 13-year highs: 116.05 dollars a barrel reached last week, more than double the 59 dollars budgeted for by the 2026 federal budget. An estimate that only a month ago had appeared too optimistic: but which now allows the Kremlin to review plans, to postpone spending cuts and fiscal prudence that the decline in revenue of energy seemed to have made inevitable. Therefore, for the moment, the hope that the economic difficulties could lead the Russian president to seek a negotiated conclusion to the war in Ukraine seems frozen.

The “all-clear” for Russian accounts will naturally depend on the duration of a crisis that has experienced violent swings: but the easing of American restrictions on Russian oil sales, the rise in prices and the worldwide search for alternative sources to Gulf supplies gives the Russian authorities the pretext to propose themselves as part of the solution. We cannot do without Russian oil, they repeat.

And there would already be a queue in front of the Kremlin doors. «Now that the world has entered a rather serious economic and energy crisis, which is worsening day by day – said spokesman Dmitrij Peskov yesterday – the market and resource situations have transformed. And the number of requests to buy our energy resources is enormous, from different sides. We are negotiating according to our best interests.”