telegraph | The revelations come amid high tension in the Middle East, with US, British,
and French warship poised for missile strikes in Syria. Iran has threatened
to retaliate.
The strategic jitters pushed Brent crude prices to a five-month high of $112 a
barrel. “We are only one incident away from a serious oil spike. The market
is a lot tighter than people think,” said Chris Skrebowski, editor of
Petroleum Review.
Leaked transcripts of a closed-door meeting between Russia’s Vladimir Putin
and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan shed an extraordinary light on the
hard-nosed Realpolitik of the two sides.
Prince Bandar, head of Saudi intelligence, allegedly
confronted the Kremlin with a mix of inducements and threats in a bid to
break the deadlock over Syria. “Let us examine how to put together a
unified Russian-Saudi strategy on the subject of oil. The aim is to agree on
the price of oil and production quantities that keep the price stable in
global oil markets,” he said at the four-hour meeting with Mr Putin. They
met at Mr Putin’s dacha outside Moscow three weeks ago.
“We understand Russia’s great interest in the oil and gas in the Mediterranean
from Israel to Cyprus. And we understand the importance of the Russian gas
pipeline to Europe. We are not interested in competing with that. We can
cooperate in this area,” he said, purporting to speak with the full backing
of the US.
The talks appear to offer an alliance between the OPEC cartel and Russia,
which together produce over 40m barrels a day of oil, 45pc of global output.
Such a move would alter the strategic landscape.
The details of the talks were first leaked to the Russian press.
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