Posted on 12/03/2022 2:59:08 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
Shipping companies have snapped up dozens of secondhand oil tankers this year, paying record prices for ice-class ships that can navigate frozen seas around Russia’s Baltic ports in winter.
A driving force behind the purchases, say people familiar with the deals: To get Russian oil to market after the harshest sanctions to date strike Russia’s energy industry next week.
The frenzy in a quiet corner of the shipping market is splitting the tanker industry in two. One part deals with Western oil companies, banks and insurers. The other, known informally in the industry as the “shadow fleet,” doesn’t, allowing it to trade with Iran, Venezuela, and increasingly with Russia, the world’s biggest exporter of crude and refined fuels.
“You’re starting a new kind of shipping market, in parallel to the normal compliant market that most of us are operating within,” said Lars Barstad, chief executive of tanker owner Frontline Ltd. FRO 5.33%increase; green up pointing triangle
Moscow faces a stifling of its oil exports from Monday when European and U.S. sanctions start to come into effect. Unless Moscow accepts a price cap set by the U.S. and its allies, the sanctions will cut Russian producers off from Western shipping and insurance markets they have long relied on to export oil.
The size and agility of the shadow fleet will help determine whether President Vladimir Putin succeeds in keeping Russia’s oil revenue flowing. Oil remains Russia’s economic lifeblood and key to funding the war in Ukraine now that Moscow has all but cut off natural gas sales to Europe.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
They could just withdraw from Ukraine and f@#$ off. The only people who will miss Putin will be the ones who are more afraid of the people than of him, for good reason.
Loyd’s will not insure Russian flagged ships, they have no choice.
Sorry, Vlad is checkmating the corrupted West at every turn, he will continue to fill his pockets with $ billions in energy , food, grain, metals and commodities, while the West goes further into unpayable debt and pays more and more for oil. Careful who you back, Vlad will end the war on his terms.
Vlad is not leaving the ethnic Russian provinces, get used to it.
Russia will self insure them.
“The Spice Must Flow.”
Vlad is the grandaddy of corruption. He will end badly. It’s what tyrants do.
“Ethnic Russians” means Soviet soldiers who married the girls they were shtupping when the Soviet Union collapsed, even in reaches of the Empire that have always hated Russia. They are in all the former Republics and satellites.
Zelensky is an “Ethnic Russian”. His grandfather fought Hitler for Stalin. Z’s first language was Russian, and he was elected on a platform of making peace with Vlad.
Finally, let’s be clear about the “Russian provinces”. Eastern Europe is a Hodge podge of different ethnicities, and national borders shift around all the time. There are enclaves of Hungarians in the Carpathian Mountains. A lot of Western Ukraine used to be Poland. Poland used to not exist as a separate nation. Hitler lost his half of occupied Poland. Stalin kept his and drove the Poles out, then said it was part of Ukraine, because they were the second most numerous ethnic group after Stalin drove the Poles out. Crimea used to be where the Tartars lived, and the rich vacationed. Still where the well-to-do vacation, but there are considerably less Tartars, because Stalin did the same to them. My grandfather was born in Slonim, which has been part of Lithuania, Poland and Bialarussia, depending on who won the last war. When the Czar wanted to conscript him to fight the Germans, he jumped on a ship and sailed to America, and good riddance to the whole place.
So there are no “ethnic Russian” provinces. There are Russians, Hungarians, Tartars, Poles, Armenians, Tajiks, and Ukrainians all over the f@#$ing place, and the borders are wherever the f@#$ they are at this time. Certainly not worth a war over changing them, except that Vlad wants Katherine’s empire back, which would include Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, etc.
The West might be corrupt and also stupid, but contrary to appearances, they do not have a death wish, and neither do the Russian or Ukrainian peoples, respectively. The last imperial power is long dead and good riddance. Hint: Its leader had a mustache. That narrows it down to two. Vlad is leaving the Kremlin, probably from the fifth floor balcony.
Amen to everything stated in your post.
I wonder why the people are believing in the counter-intuitive propaganda of sort that you have just posted? If the Russians in republics are what you are calling then then who are Americans in let’s say Midwest or California?
The Russian tankers will not be stopped, that would start a major war.
The europeons know this plus they need the oil so they will pretend to be outraged that Russian oil is flowing but will buy it and at higher prices.
Americans. An intact empire. The Soviet Empire collapsed in 1991. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1918. The Spanish Empire in bits and pieces over a few centuries. That’s how most empires go. You can’t just unilaterally impose a dead empire on its former subjects. Trying to do so is reactionary megalomania.
Russians are all over Eastern Europe and Eurasia. So are all the other ethnicities. An Armenian pal of mine, a nuclear physicist and one-time Muscovite, told me that Russian is just a dialect of Ukrainian that started when the Mongolian overlords tried to speak Ukrainian. It’s plausible. I don’t know if it’s true. But that’s how English started, with the Norman overlords trying to speak Saxon German.
And yes, the Ukrainians have done some heinous things to Russians in Donbas. The Russians returned the favor. At the root of it is that the Ukrainians are terrified of Putin, and look at the Russians as Czechs and Slovaks looked at the Sudetenland Germans. After the war, they were kicked out en masse from Czechoslovakia. It’s conceivable that after this war, when Ukrainian moms and pops are reunited with their confiscated children, they might be real PO’d at Russians and exact some petty revenge with a mass expulsion, too.
This is Europe, land of long-held grudges. Jomo Kenyatta after the end of colonial rule, and European Jews after the Holocaust, were the ones who looked forward instead of backward. But not Europeans, and certainly not the Eastern Europeans. They pass on grudges generation to generation like titles to land.
But face facts. This was a stupid, ill-advised war. Putin is going to lose and be gone from the world stage. At least that much will be accomplished. The fewer reactionary megalomaniacs, the better. Ukraine is what it is, some sort of fledgling state, sporadically democratic at best, barbarous at worst, and the EU is their great hope. Yuck. Good luck with that to them both.
Price cap will not hurt Russia.
It has too many other ‘outlets’ to sell its oil to, way too many ‘middle men’ who will scoop up that Russian oil, gas, etc. and then turn around and sell to Europe, and the US for profit.
India will not abide by the oil price cap.
China will not abide by the oil price caps.
A lot of nations and countries that make up the Global South will not abide by the oil price cap.
The losers here, as par, are those who thought that sanctions would destroy Russia and force Putin to be removed, those who think the oil price caps will destroy Russia and force Putin to be removed, and most of all the suicidal psychopaths’ who run the EU and each respective country in the EU that supported the sanctions and are now supporting the oil price caps.
Again, as par, the last laugh goes to Putin and Russia.
The rest of you are Losers with a capital ‘L’.
Your Armenian friend is a moron. Ukrainians have a simple way out - to submit and forget about their grudges or die. They had a chance in independence and failed at it badly.
They will win, the way I see it. They’ve been independent for 30 years, despite a long-standing campaign by Russia to absorb them piecemeal. Russia had a chance to join the 21st Century and failed at it. They might yet turn around. My Armenian friend, btw, IS a nuclear physicist, one-time major Moscow bank executive, and nobody’s fool.
There are educated liberal idiots who don’t have a clue. No, they won’t win. Russia is already in the 21th century, this crap is specifically invented to keep it behind and they know it.
Take some Rogaine and put it on your bald assertions.
Listen, you have just admitted that heinous things were done to the Russians in Donbas. What should have been the reaction? What the US did after 9/11? Russia’s problem is that it failed to use A-stan as a vehicle to impose cost and maximize the American casualties but stupidly supported and assisted the whole thing on the side of the US.
After Ukraine thing more than 80% of Russians hate the US and it is not going away for at least two generations. That was never the case before. At peak of Cold War there was understanding that there are rival systems and only 4% registered the negative attitude. Now they just don’t understand why do you want to undermine and kill them and want revenge.
Listen, you have just admitted that heinous things were done to the Russians in Donbas. What should have been the reaction? What the US did after 9/11?
Donbas is within the territory of the Ukraine. And the DPR did just as many, if not more, heinous thing. It’s called a civil war. And considering the fact that Russia was organizing and supporting the DPR and related separatist organizations whose purpose was to commit atrocities within Ukraine’s territory, the analogy of 9/11 is entirely reversible.
It’s called a civil war. Ukraine’s ultimate reaction to the whole mess was to throw over Poroshenko, for his corruption AND for his support of all-out war on civilians in Donbas, in favor of TV star, Russian speaker and political novice Zelensky, who ran on a platform of ending corruption and making peace in Donbas. He tried to do the latter by negotiating in good faith with Putin and his proxies in Donbas, but “good faith” is a two-way street, and Putin was basically intent on a full-blown invasion on the PRETEXT of Donbas, because his real goal is reestablishing the dead Soviet empire, and right now he’s committing heinous atrocities in Donbas against Ukrainians and Russians alike, in Donbas and elsewhere, as his horde retreats in disgrace.
It is a huge, FUBAR mess, and Putin is the PROBLEM, and a threat to the other former Soviet Republics and Satellites. Zelensky, despite his failure as a peacetime President, has turned out to be a formidable war-time leader. And good on him. Putin needs to be gone.
“After Ukraine thing more than 80% of Russians hate the US and it is not going away for at least two generations. That was never the case before. At peak of Cold War there was understanding that there are rival systems and only 4% registered the negative attitude. Now they just don’t understand why do you want to undermine and kill them and want revenge.”
Russians are gas-lighted, and have no say in the matter anyway. Like they’ll give an honest answer to the pollsters, whom they believe to be agents of the secret police.
No, Ze promised piece but he didn’t try hard to enforce it. He travelled to Donbas to try to convince his own troops to withdraw, only to be told to go pound sand. Then the Nazis on payroll of the US Embassy stated riots and defaced his office. He has become a worse version of Poroshenko ever since.
Regarding Putin as a problem, gaslighting, secret police, pollsters and so on you have all the right ideas, except backwards.
The problem of the US foreign policy is that it is all about gaslighting, and they’ll they say that the victim is the problem.
And of course, after every high placed US official stated that he is going to tear apart a Russian economy and kill as many Russians as possible, Washington based think tanks published plans to “de-imperialize” Russia, the people are going to secretly love America and hate Putin.
Just LOL. What sort of sick logic is it? Like if every freedom loving American supported Nazi Germany in WWII. FDR after all was a socialist and Hitler had trains running on time.
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