Buyers of Russian oil making idiotic move

Hello, everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado.

Today we’re gonna talk about the fact that energy markets are just at the very beginning of digesting just what the scale of the problem with the Ukraine war is.

Now, one of the things that we have seen is there have been a lot of people around the world for various reasons, coming from multiple backgrounds, talking about how, if the Europeans and the Americans just choose to not use Russian energy, that there is a figurative boatload of other people who are willing to do so.

In specific, the Indians and the Chinese have been fairly aggressive about going out and booking ships to pick up crude from various Russian ports, specifically Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, and then shuttling them to another location where they can be loaded onto larger super tankers to make the trip to India and China.

And that is true. That is happening. The scale is debatable, but it’s certainly occurring.

And the United States and the European Union are, let’s just say less than enthused about it.

But today, April 4th, a new wrinkle has entered in. The Russians have begun a large scale artillery, excuse me, not artillery, missile and airstrike assault on the city of Odessa.

Now Odessa is important for a number of reasons. It’s the last major port. It is the major port. It is the commercial capital. It is on the way to Moldova and Romania. A lot of things- we’re gonna put some links at the bottom of this newsletter to give you an idea of just how important Odessa is.

But the bottom line is it’s a port, and the Russians are specifically targeting refining port and tank infrastructure, which will, how can I put this delicately, lay bare the idiocy of any plans to export oil from the Black Sea to anywhere else on the planet writ large.

Because now we have the Russians specifically, explicitly going after port infrastructure and specifically energy assets.

So if your corporate plan or your national plan is to rely on the United States and NATO to make the seaways safe so that you can import Russian energy from a war zone where the Russians are bombing energy infrastructure, you should probably get a new gut job, you’re not very good at your current one. Anyway, that’s it for me until next time. Okay.

Previous pieces mentioned in the video:

China, Oil, and the Ukraine War

Odessa, and Beyond

Russia’s Twilight War

A Ukraine War and the End of Russia