Exxon has Sakhalin 1 and lost 3, Shell 2, and Total Khargaya.
Those projects are really big and profitable and the Russians want a bigger share or more attrative terms than what Yeltsin gave them away for in the 80's.
While I dont condone what they have done, it is no worse than Chavez and Morales who kicked alot of companies right out of the country and nationalized their assets.
It is a sign of the times in the oil industry these days.
After living in Norway for 17 years, I can understand it as the Norwegian state felt that they should have control of their natural resources.
Actually economic rape of Russia in 90th undermined cooperation for decades to come. It was worse then in Weimar Germany and we know how Weimar Germany ended.
Economist Laszlo Andor has called this "Europe's great depression", the biggest economic slump in the continent since the 30s. in 90th IMF policies had wrecked nearly half of Russia's economic capacity in the space of just a few years -- a level of destruction not even Hitler's Nazi armies had achieved.
Now chickens come roost home. Instead of chasing quick buck and trying to make Russia New Latin America multinationals would be better off building mutually beneficial economic relations.
As Anne Williamson's testified before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1999. "It shows how the historic opportunity given the U.S. to help transform Russia into a free, peaceful, pro-Western country was squandered in the form of a bruising economic rape carried out by corrupt Russian politicians and businessmen, assisted by Bush and (especially) Clinton administrations engaged in political payoffs to Wall Street bankers and others, and by ineptitude and greed on the part of the U.S. Treasury and the Harvard Institute for International Development, assisted by fellow travelers and manipulators at Nordex, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve."