The writer is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Before March 2022 he was head of strategy and innovations at Gazprom Neft
Donald Trump seems to have finally run out of patience with Vladimir Putin. Having exhausted other ways of getting the Kremlin to negotiate, Trump has resorted to the customary tool he was trying to avoid — sanctions — and gone after the most traditional of targets: Russian oil majors.
But after four years of full-scale sanctions against Russia, these measures will be far less efficient. The war in Ukraine has made the global energy market increasingly fragmented, with plenty of workarounds for the Kremlin and its partners to exploit. With new restrictions against Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s top two producers, almost 80 per cent of Russian oil production (8 per cent of the global total) is now sanctioned and, in theory, should disappear from global markets.