Your post made me think of this meme below. Its always astonishing how far the western mind will go; in order to rationalize the death and destruction we hand out like treats on Halloween. The west poked the bear, it woke up and now we're scrambling to figure out how to put it back in its cave.

thats the incredulous reality we live in. ty for that image btw, i never saw it portrayed better.

Below graphic is a good representation of what happened with Russian oil in light of sanctions in the last 2 years

https://x.com/profstonge/status/1740815576694686057?s=20

On a percent of total sold terms, India basically replaced EU. It's not as if India consumed all that oil but rather just arbitraged and middle manned it.

>EU places sanctions on Russia
>Russia sells discounted oil to India
>EU still needs to fill the supply gap, so they purchase oil from India, except at much higher prices compared to what they paid the Russians
>Russian oil revenue still exceeds pre-pandemic average price/barrel while Europe is still buying Russian oil, only now it's indirectly and at a much higher price


The stupidity of sanctions on a commoditized product that everyone needs.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Dec 30 2023 09:24am

Ministry of Emergency Situations: 14 people were killed, 108 were injured during the shelling of Belgorod

When the center of Belgorod was shelled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, 12 adults and two children were killed and 108 were injured, including 15 children, the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations reported.
Children's Ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova said that a total of 17 children were injured, four of them in intensive care in serious condition.
Earlier, the Ministry of Emergency Situations reported ten dead and 45 injured. The city center came under fire around 3 p.m. The Ministry of Emergency Situations indicated that ten fires occurred after the shelling; they were extinguished.
The Ministry of Defense reported that the strike used two Vilkha missiles “with prohibited cluster ammunition” and rockets from the Czech-made Vampire multiple launch rocket system.
“The Vilkha missiles and most of the Vampire MLRS rockets were intercepted by air defense systems. Several rockets and cluster parts from the downed Vilkha missiles hit the city of Belgorod,” the department indicated.

Source: RBC
https://www.rbc.ru/politics/30/12/2023/6590307c9a79474ca9c729f6

This post was edited by Norlander on Dec 30 2023 09:32am

You need to be careful to differentiate between 5 energy markets (oil products, crude oil, electricity, piped natural gas and LNG). All 5 have different levels of restrictions and specifics.

1) there are no sanctions against Russian products or crude oil per se.
2) there is a price cap in place for Russian origin products and crude which is roughly defined as “refined in Russia” and “containing more than 50% Russian product of Russian origin”.

So if you blend Russian origin with products refined in eg Turkey out of Russian crude you technically comply with all sanctions and price cap as you now export 50%+ Turkish products to Europe. Et voila.

Here is an example of Morocco that doesn’t have a single refinery supplying Europe with oil products.

https://tfiglobalnews.com/2023/05/02/morocco-made-the-best-out-of-russia-ukraine-war/

(In reality it’s a bit more complicated, but you get the gist of what’s going on).

This post was edited by Malopox on Dec 30 2023 09:42am

I think in the near future we will see lots more of these desperation attacks. I've recently realized that the allies took the most casualties during the last months of ww2, before Germany surrendered. When an army realizes that the supply chains are breaking down and they are running out of munitions they start attacking and lashing out instead of holding a defensive line.

I believe the average Ukrainian soldier is starting to realize that zelenksy came home with no new funding, so they either have to provoke Russia, trying to enact an unproportional response to get the west more heavily involved or they slowly die fighting a war of Attrition knowing they'll lose. Russian casualties may increase over the next couple of months but that's only because Ukrainians now know that the end is nigh. The west fucked up and Ukraine pays the price

Let's hope that Russia won't respond to this asymmetrically

The blending was one way to get around it, exporting it to places like Morocco, India is generally in line with that.

Ultimately the mechanic was basically something like this, at least the way I understand it. The Russians can continue to sell to EU under the 60 price cap when oil was in the 70-90 range or they can sell it to these middle men at a discount (hard to know exactly how much the discount for each client/transaction but I heard it ranged from 10-30 dollars at some points in time, but tightened with time, last I read current oil discount to India is only 5/barrel). Which they can re-blend and resale and pocket the difference.

So if you're Russia, let these 3rd party middle men earn that spread which in turn hurts the sanctioning countries ultimately, instead of selling directly to euros under the price cap. Either way they would earn between 50-60 a barrel but this way they can hurt Europe back.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Dec 30 2023 10:13am