A series of analyses published the first week of June by the Wall Street Journal, OilPrice.com and ZeroHedge have made clear that the European Union’s announced embargo of Russian oil, part of its sixth and “most rigorous” sanctions package, is exclusively hitting European users of energy.
These sanctions do, according to OilPrice.com, require more organized planning by India, China, other Asian importers and the so-called OPEC+ (which includes Russia among others), in order to compensate for the inability now to insure Russian oil cargoes. But this cooperation is, in fact, taking place; and even though the full EU embargo is supposed to be executed only by December 2022, even larger sales of Russian oil to Asian buyers, on top of India’s and China’s large April-May increases, are being arranged. As the Journal headlined its June 1 article, “Russian Oil Producers Stay One Step Ahead of Sanctions.” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-oil-producers-stay-one-step-ahead-of-sanctions-11654076614?mod=hp_lead_pos3)
