Europe is set to ban Russian oil products, the latest strike on the Kremlin war chest
Global oil markets are bracing for more upheaval in the next couple of weeks after the European Union bans all Russian refined oil products in retaliation for the war in Ukraine. Starting Sunday, the 27-nation bloc will prohibit imports of Russian gasoline, diesel and other products used throughout Europe.
At the same time, the Group of Seven advanced countries and allies will institute a global price cap on Russian refined oil products. That will bar access to ships, marine insurers and services unless the refined oil products are purchased for a price at or below an agreed limit. A similar system
went into effect for Russian crude oil in December.
A price cap for refined products has yet to be set. Analysts say there will likely be one price set for diesel, another for products such as gasoline.
Sales of oil and natural gas make up
the lion's share of Russia's government budget. The United States, the EU and other allies are targeting Russian energy in a bid to tighten the economic noose around the Kremlin, making it harder to finance its war in Ukraine. But the measures could also lead to price spikes.
It affects fuel for planes, cars, trucks and machinery
For the last couple of months, the EU has banned Russian crude oil imports but allowed the sale of refined products. The bloc will now join the
United States and the
United Kingdom in implementing a broader embargo.
The new EU ban will apply to anything produced from Russian crude oil, says Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a consultancy in London.
"Gasoline that goes into a car, the jet fuel that goes into a plane or diesel that goes into trucks, into operating machinery," he says, "so it's really the fuel that we actually consume and keeps the economy going."
Last year, Europe imported about 700,000 barrels per day of Russian diesel — around half its total imports of the fuel, according to market analysts.
Europe has to look elsewhere, including to U.S. suppliers
Matteo Ilardo, a London-based geopolitical analyst with the risk intelligence firm RANE, says the ban will have an impact for Europeans. He points to France's heavy reliance on Russian diesel.
"France usually imports around 20% of total seaborne diesel exports from Russia. So being able to phase out completely that much of diesel will be a challenge," he says.
Europe has been gobbling up Russian diesel over the past few months ahead of the ban. Hedi Grati, the head of refining and marketing at S&P Global Commodity Insights, an energy research and data company in London, says Europe does have some refineries but not enough to meet the demand.
"The diesel will simply have to come from somewhere else," he says. "The most logical suppliers are countries in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, places like that, and then also India and the United States."
And Russia seeks other buyers
Just as it did with the December ban on crude, Russia will have to find new places to sell its refined oil products.
"Those could be in East Africa, in Asia, they could be in Latin America," Grati says. "What you're looking at is one great big reshuffle to get desirable barrels to Europe, and then barrels deemed undesirable from Russia to those other markets."
In a twist, the ban on Russian oil products could boost its sales of crude to China and India. Both are large refiners. It's legal for them to import Russian crude, refine it and send it back to Europe, according to Bronze with the Energy Aspects consultancy.
"It is being viewed by some critics as a loophole or a weakness. But I think that is a deliberate part of the policy design," Bronze says. The U.S. and its allies want to ensure that the products continue flowing to global markets to avoid price spikes.
It also reflects differences between the way international customs rules apply to crude oil versus refined products, he explains.
"Once it's been through a refinery, for customs rules, the oil is viewed as transformed and ... then its country of origin becomes wherever that refinery was located," Bronze says.
Market reaction is predicted, but will it sway Moscow?
Oil is a global market, so the impact of the latest ban will likely be felt beyond Europe. Ilardo says there will undoubtedly be turmoil in the global oil markets initially.
"We'll ... have a price spike definitely in February right after the ban comes in place," he says. "This will be simply a market reaction. Markets don't like uncertainty, so they usually react with price spikes."
That's not good news for consumers or businesses in Europe, which is already struggling with a weakened economy.
The big question is whether this ban like the other will have any impact on Russian President Vladimir Putin in ending the war in Ukraine.
Bronze says undoubtedly the EU bans on crude and refined oil products will hurt Russia's economy.
"But I think the difficult question is whether that economic pain is enough to change President Putin's attitude towards the conflict in Ukraine or his wider policies towards the West," he says. "And I think that's much less likely to happen."
Slow Ratcheting Up of Ukraine Aid Lays Out Welcome Mat to China in Taiwan | Opinion
As Russian President
Vladimir Putin continues to
kill civilians in order to break the will of the Ukrainian people, the allied decision to
provide hundreds of main battle tanks to Ukraine could fundamentally change the course of the conflict, giving Ukraine the boost it needs to push the Russians out of eastern Ukraine and perhaps even to retake Crimea.
While this critically important decision has rightly been lauded, we ought not be fooled into thinking that our efforts in Ukraine have been a triumph. To the contrary, when our adversaries look at our approach to Ukraine, they don't see bold moves, they see hesitance, delay, and weakness at every turn. The sad reality is that while there is no doubt that the weaponry we've supplied has been critical to Ukraine's battlefield success, had the White House and our friends in Europe provided these weapons much earlier, we might well have deterred the Russian invasion or, at a minimum, enabled Ukrainian forces to actually win this war.
To be sure, the Biden administration gets credit for keeping the
allied coalition strong on sanctions and leading the way on
pouring billions of dollars of military equipment into the fight. Yet the reality is that much of this aid came only after it became clear that Ukrainian forces were dramatically more capable and motivated than expected, and that the Russian forces were drastically underprepared and ill-supplied for the fight. Indeed, the key story of this war has not been bold allied support, but the slow drip of more (and better) weapons into the fight, even as Russia killed more than 7,000 civilians,
including more than 400 children, and decimated Ukraine's infrastructure.
The Biden White House's hesitance to act before Feb. 24 had a clear source: the fear that overly aggressive support might cause the Russians to lash out, provoking the invasion itself. Of course, we knew this wasn't true long before the war began. The intelligence community
repeatedly told the White House about Russian intentions; they planned to invade, provocation or not. And despite the Biden administration's public campaigning and admittedly novel strategy of announcing Russia's attempted fakery to the world, this did little to dissuade Putin.
Other than public pleas for peace, the unconvincing threat of sanctions, and failed diplomacy, the White House had no real deterrent strategy, and certainly not one that leveraged America's hard power. Publicly providing Ukraine with key weapons ahead of time would have made American resolve clear to Putin in the only language that he understands: raw strength. This didn't happen and, to no surprise, Putin attacked anyway.
And yet even then we dithered. The allies couldn't agree on what weapons to supply and when. It took months for the United States to begin supplying the
critically important HIMARS missile systems and nearly a year to get to main battle tanks. Indeed, the White House only got there after it was shamed into it by new
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's announcement to provide British tanks. Even now, there remain debates within the White House about whether we ought provide
even more capable missile systems and we continue to
resist providing fighter jets that could take the fight to the Russians.
Allowing Putin to dictate the terms of the conflict since the onset (and more broadly since 2014), the White House has leaned back instead of forward, and our adversaries unquestionably see this less-than-convincing stance. For every article that lays out the hand-wringing in the White House over escalation, and each time the administration trots out its weak-kneed "
integrated deterrence" approach (
ably taken apart by Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin), we face allies who see us as itinerant and adversaries who are increasingly unafraid of us. And so, while many pundits on cable news have applauded Biden's actions, the reality is that we are in a proxy war in Ukraine specifically because his integrated deterrence failed miserably.
The consequences of this indecisiveness are not limited to Eastern Europe. Undoubtedly, the Chinese are watching as they consider their next steps against Taiwan. Already, one prominent American military leader has assessed that the
Chinese could take action as soon as 2025, and while this may be forward leaning, it certainly isn't far off. What the Chinese have taken from the Ukraine conflict that the United States and our allies aren't steadfast in our support of those who have turned to us, and that we prefer slow escalation—and only when our team is winning—to bold moves. As a result, they have learned that the right approach is to strike fast and crush the opposition because the West won't move quickly, particularly where, as in the Taiwan Straits, we don't have enough forward forces to put up an immediate fight.
None of this, of course, is new news. Even prior to the Ukraine conflict, much ink had been spilled about the need for an effective deterrence plan for Taiwan. Whereas the
Biden Administration's policy can be described as waffling at best,
Xi Jinping has
clearly signaled the China's intentions for reunification by force if necessary. The hesitate-first foreign policy of the Biden team makes clear the United States would vacillate before deciding whether to arm Taiwan to the teeth to do battle and certainly before committing American forces to the fight. This invites the Chinese to employ a
blitzkrieg strategy, overwhelming Taiwan via air, land, and sea long before the United States could mobilize any effective response.
Given the unique supply chain challenges presented by operating in the Taiwan Strait, it is imperative that any attack against Taiwan be deterred with a strong and immediate response from the United States, in conjunction with our key regional allies in Japan, South Korea, and Australia, in order to blunt a Chinese attack and prevent a swift victory. That requires forward-deployed forces of a level that the United States has been thus far unwilling to commit. In certain ways, the pre-Taiwan scenario is much like the pre-Ukraine scenario: if the United States fails to provide the right kind of weaponry and pre-position forces ahead of an invasion, the odds of deterring said invasion are zero. So, rather than exchanging congratulatory high-fives for doing what we should have done a year ago in Ukraine, we ought learn the right lesson and get ahead of China in the Taiwan theatre now.
Jamil N. Jaffer is the former chief counsel and senior adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served in senior national security roles on Capitol Hill and in the Bush Administration. He is the Founder and Executive Director at the National Security Institute at George Mason University's Scalia Law School.
John Poulson is manager of public policy and government relations at George Mason University's National Security Institute. He previously served as special assistant to the under secretary for international affairs at the Treasury Department and as an aide to Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI).
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
Finland joins group of countries working to hold Russia liable for crime of aggression
Finland has joined the core group working on the creation of a Special Tribunal for the crime of Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Source: Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, cited by European Pravda
Quote: "On 2 February, 2023, Finland joined a group created to support Ukraine in ensuring Russia's liability for its crime of aggression," the ministry said, recalling that core group now includes 19 countries and the EU's foreign policy service, in addition to Ukraine and Finland.
"Supporting and strengthening the law-based world order is one of the priorities of Finland's foreign policy. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a blatant violation of the UN Charter... War crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression are the most serious international crimes that affect the entire international community and pose a threat to global peace and security," the Foreign Ministry emphasised.
Details: The ministry noted that war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine are being investigated on a large scale domestically in the country and around the world, and Finland supports both the International Criminal Court's investigations and Ukrainian experts.
Quote: "[However,] Russia's liability for the illegal invasion of Ukraine and its consequences will be incomplete if the crime of aggression is left out of the picture. Finland is willing to help Ukraine find the most effective ways to bring the perpetrators to justice," said Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto.
Details: The communiqué also stated that only persons who, by virtue of their position and authority, exercise control and can direct the policy or military actions of a particular state can be guilty of the crime of aggression.
Background: At the end of January, the group on the creation of a special tribunal
met in Prague, Czech Republic, with 20 countries participating.
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EU supports de-mining of liberated areas in Ukraine with additional €25 million programme
In the margins of the EU-Ukraine Summit taking place in Kyiv today, EU High Representative Josep Borrell announced an additional €25 million support to Ukraine’s de-mining of liberated territories.
These mines and explosives left behind by the Russian army constitute a danger for returning civilian populations and slows down the revival of economic activity, especially in the transport and agricultural sectors.
“A large spread of mines and other explosive ordnances is being found in territories liberated by Ukrainian Armed Forces. Unfortunately, Ukraine is one of the most contaminated countries in the world by military remnants of any kind and these people are doing a gigantic work in order to clean the landscape and make it safe,” said Borrell. “Protecting civilians and their livelihood is a priority.”
The funding will allow it to provide essential equipment for Ukrainian state mine action operators and support the capacities of the Ukrainian authorities to effectively manage the national mine action sector.
CIA chief says next six months of Russia-Ukraine war will be “critical”
The next six months of Russia’s war against Ukraine will be “critical” according to U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns, Olivia Gazis, a journalist at U.S. news channel CBS News, reported on Twitter on Feb. 2.
“In Ukraine, CIA’s Burns says the next six months will be ‘critical,’ with Putin still betting that ‘political fatigue’ will set in across the West,” she tweeted, quoting the CIA director during a presentation at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.
“‘We do not assess’ that Moscow is serious about negotiations.’”
According to Gazis, Burns also calls the deepening military ties between Iran and Russia “especially concerning.”
The journalist added that “CIA’s Burns says of the ‘30 or so hours’ he spent in Ukraine last month, six were in bomb shelters – there were two separate strikes against civilian facilities by Russians using Iranian UAVs.”
Burns secretly visited Kyiv in January and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The U.S. intelligence chief and Ukrainian leadership reportedly discussed the possibility of a new Russian offensive. Further support from the U.S. Congress was also on the agenda.
EU to train 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers by end of 2023, reports Borrell
The European Union will train 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers by the end of the year, the Ukrainian news agency
UNIAN reported on Feb. 3, citing EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell.
The training will take place under the European Union Military Assistance Mission in support of Ukraine (EUMAM). It will be held mainly in Germany, Poland, and other member states.
“The success has been so great that now the goal is to prepare an additional 15,000by the end of the year,” Borrell said.
“Which means 30,000 personnel of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in total,”
He also noted that the total military aid under the European Peace Fund amounts to€3.6 billion ($4 billion).
“If we combine what the member states are doing bilaterally together with this intergovernmental fund, I think that the aid for military support has reached €12 billion ($13 billion),” Borrell noted.
“It’s not as much as the United States has allocated, but it’s still 40% of U.S. military support.”
On Jan. 23, the European Union had
approved additional €500 million ($545 million) in military aid to Ukraine.
For both articles (
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/23Ue5)
Soaring Death Toll Gives Grim Insight Into Russian Tactics
Moscow is sending poorly trained recruits, including convicts, to the front lines in eastern Ukraine to pave the way for more seasoned fighters, U.S. and allied officials say.
The number of Russian troops killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching 200,000, a stark symbol of just how badly President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion has gone, according to American and other Western officials.
While the officials caution that casualties are notoriously difficult to estimate, particularly because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, they say the slaughter from fighting in and around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and the town of Soledar has ballooned what was already a heavy toll.
With Moscow desperate for a major battlefield victory and viewing Bakhmut as the key to seizing the entire eastern Donbas area, the Russian military has sent poorly trained recruits and former convicts to the front lines, straight into the path of Ukrainian shelling and machine guns. The result, American officials say, has been hundreds of troops killed or injured a day.
Russia analysts say that the loss of life is unlikely to be a deterrent to Mr. Putin’s war aims. He has no political opposition at home and has framed the war as the kind of struggle the country faced in World War II, when more than 8 million Soviet troops died. U.S. officials have said that they believe that Mr. Putin can sustain hundreds of thousands of casualties in Ukraine, although higher numbers could cut into his political support.
Ukraine’s casualty figures are also difficult to ascertain, given Kyiv’s reluctance to disclose its own wartime losses. But in Bakhmut, hundreds of Ukrainian troops have been wounded and killed daily at times as well, officials said. Better trained infantry formations are kept in reserve to safeguard them, while lesser prepared troops, such as those in the territorial defense units, are kept on the front line and bear the brunt of shelling.
The last public Biden administration estimate of casualties came last November, when Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more than 100,000 troops on each side had been killed and wounded since the war began. At the time, officials said privately that the numbers were closer to 120,000.
“I would say it’s significantly well over 100,000 now,” General Milley said at a news conference last month in Germany, adding that the Russian toll included “regular military, and also their mercenaries in the Wagner Group.”
At two meetings last month between senior military and defense officials from NATO and partner countries, officials said the fighting in the Donbas had turned into, as one of them put it, a meat grinder.
On Norwegian TV on Jan. 22, Gen. Eirik Kristoffersen, Norway’s defense chief, said estimates were that Russia had suffered 180,000 dead and wounded, while Ukraine had 100,000 killed or wounded in action along with 30,000 civilian deaths. General Kristoffersen, in an email to The New York Times through his spokesman, said that there is “much uncertainty regarding these numbers, as no one at the moment are able to give a good overview. They could be both lower or even higher.”
Senior U.S. officials said this week that they believe the number for Russia is closer to 200,000. That toll, in just 11 months, is eight times higher than American casualties in two decades of war in Afghanistan.
The figures for Ukraine and Russia are estimates based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and on-the-ground media reports, as well as official reporting from both governments. Establishing precise numbers is extremely difficult, and estimates vary, even within the U.S. government.
A senior U.S. military official last month described the combat around Bakhmut as savage. The two sides exchanged several thousand rounds of artillery fire each day, while the Wagner private military company, which has been central to Russia’s efforts there, had essentially begun using recruited convicts as cannon fodder, the official told reporters. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.
The convicts took the brunt of the Ukrainian response while the group’s more seasoned fighters moved in behind them to claim ground, the official said. Wagner has recruited some 50,000 troops to fight in Ukraine, according to senior American military and defense officials.
Thousands of the convicts have been killed, a loss of life that has shocked American officials, who say the strategic value of Bakhmut simply is not in line with the price Russia has paid.
In an interview on Tuesday, a senior Defense Department official pointed to myriad military supply and tactical problems to explain the Russian tactics. The Russian military is running low on critical supplies and replenishment, said Colin H. Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy. “They’re running low on artillery. They’re running low on standoff munitions, and they are substituting by sending convicts in human waves into places like Bakhmut and Soledar.”
The Russian military has been following the Wagner playbook and deliberately using the poorly trained troops to draw, and deplete, Ukrainian fire, senior American military and defense officials said.
Kusti Salm, Estonia’s deputy defense minister, in a briefing with reporters in Washington last week, said that Russia was better able to stand its losses than Ukraine.
“In this particular area, the Russians have employed around 40,000 to 50,000 inmates or prisoners,” Mr. Salm said. “They are going up against regular soldiers, people with families, people with regular training, valuable people for the Ukrainian military.”
“So the exchange rate is unfair,” he added. “It’s not one to one because for Russia, inmates are expendable. From an operational perspective, this is a very unfair deal for the Ukrainians and a clever tactical move from the Russian side.”
Moscow has thrown people it sees as expendable into battles for decades, if not centuries. During World War II, Joseph Stalin sent close to one million prisoners to the front. Boris Sokolov, a Russia historian,
describes in a piece called “Gulag Reserves” in the Russian opposition magazine Grani.ru that an additional one million “special settlers”— deportees and others viewed by the Soviet government as second-class citizens — were also forced to fight during World War II.
“In essence, it does not matter how big the Russian losses are, since their overall human resource is much greater than Ukraine’s,” Mr. Salm, the Estonian official, said in a follow-up email. “In Russia the life of a soldier is worth nothing. A dead soldier, on the other hand, is a hero, regardless of how he died. All lost soldiers can be replaced, and the number of losses will not shift the public opinion against the war.”
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
Italy to deliver Ukraine SAMP/T air defense missile system within next two months
According to information published by the International Press Agency Reuters on February 3, 2023, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani announced that the
SAMP/T air defense missile system jointly developed by Italy and France will be delivered to Ukraine within the next two months.
Citing information from the Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, Italy expects that the
SAMP/T air defense missile system will be operational within seven to eight weeks.
The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues to request the United States to provide more air defense systems following the recent Russian aerial and missile attacks against the Ukrainian armed forces and the main cities of Ukraine.
Citing information from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, at the beginning of this month, the Russian armed forces launched several S-300 missiles against the city of Kramatorsk in the northern portion of Donetsk Oblast. Russian Iskander ballistic missiles were also launched in different areas within Ukrainian territory.
The SAMP/T (French acronym of Sol-Air Moyenne Portée Terrestre - Ground to Air for Land Medium Range) is a Medium-Range Surface-to-Air Missile system developed by the European consortium Eurosam. The system is designed to provide air defense against a wide range of aerial threats, including aircraft, helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and cruise missiles. The primary target of SAMP/T is to provide protection to military forces, critical infrastructure, and populated areas against air attacks.
The SAMP/T is able to fire Aster 30 missiles, which are capable of intercepting aerial threats at ranges of up to 300 kilometers and altitudes of up to 30 kilometers. The system is mobile, allowing it to be deployed to different locations as needed, and features both passive and active electronic countermeasures to defend against enemy attempts to jam or spoof the system.
The SAMP/T uses a modernized version of the Arabel radar offering more performance and combat capabilities against higher speed targets and higher altitude targets. It can track up to 100 targets simultaneously and manage the uplink transmission of command update data to 16 missiles simultaneously.
