Bheki Gila
IT IS seldom the case that war is fought over one reason and one reason only. Empirically, wars have historic contexts that brew their own toxic cocktails. They are covered in layers of admixture of truths, half-truths and ever so often, outright deception, some of which will never be accessible no matter how long the execution of the war takes.
It wasn’t going to take long before one of this war’s many layers would begin to unveil. This is the role and effect of oil and gas. When the body count continues to rise, the historic order of these layers is violently ruptured and lain bare for everyone to reckon.
This phase of conflict has subjected the relationship of the warring parties and their supporting allies to unusual pressures, as urgent as they are inevitable.
The set of sanctions designed to cower the Russian bear to capitulation were bound to have a long lead time, a fact that was known to the parties imposing them.
Russia has been under sanctions for a long time anyway, with little or no impact on its sovereign resolve or policy designs. Still, it came as a surprise when the announcement of this raft of sanctions did not achieve the desired quick results that many had hoped for. Something else is needed, something so impactful it may potentially turn the tide of war in favour of Ukraine.
In the estimation of the Americans, this meant that the oil money flowing to Russia to bolster their economy and help sustain the Ukrainian war offensive, needed to be severed without any further delay. To this approach, however, the Europeans demurred and by their equivocation, ruptured the sanctity of the alliance and betrayed the unity of their purpose.
Leading up to the Zulu hour of the invasion, the Russians have been careful in guarding the secret that they ought to jealously keep who their friends or enemies are. For obvious reasons, there is no doubt that such prized information is a premium account closer to the execution of any planned war.
As predictable as the causes of this war were, they provided the belligerents with enough opportunity to either validate or refute the prosaic truism of Sun Tzu in the Art of War. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, the Chinese legend sagaciously philosophised. At the beginning of the conflict, America sought to keep its friends close and its enemies as far away as possible. For the Russians, however, they kept their friends in close proximity while keeping the economic instincts of their enemies closer.
For the rest of us drawn into the conflict by indirect consequence, the gas prices have been climbing phenomenally, breaking new records of highs as they do. And in these unprecedented times, a $200 (R3009) a barrel price tag for crude oil is fast becoming a possibility. The psychological and public pressure such a priced barrel exerts is enormous for the democracy reliant Nato allies.
Most of them get so much of their fossil fuel fix from Russia. As hard as it may be, they have to keep up pretences, even if they have no alternatives of supply if they impose sanctions against Russian oil and gas imports. This lack of alternative energy supply sources inclines Europe in keeping their friends close, but Russia even closer.
There is a panoply of sanction measures preferred against Russia, including some high-profile oligarchs, a select slew of state-owned and privately held banks and their airlines. Russia has been banned from the Brussels based SWIFT, the global interbank messaging system.
The latter announcement raises a curious question. If Europe is still buying 40 percent of its energy needs from Russia and oil assets are priced in petrodollars, how is the money paid to Russia? Arguably, it is not in the interest of chattering classes to know. It is information kept close among Europe, the US and indeed their worst foe, the invading Russians.
Not to be outdone in the strategy stakes, the Americans are desperate to prevent a further escalation of gas prices at the pump. They quickly called on their Saudi friends to prevail on their Opec brethren to increase production and cushion against the rising prices of oil.
To the chagrin of the Biden administration, Riyadh and their UAE partners were disinclined to oblige them. Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler in the House of Saud, has his mind preoccupied with the obsession to destroy Yemen and, in the most convenient way, avoid being sued in the many courts of the US for the violent and gruesome death of Jamal Khashoggi.
Somewhat perplexed by this attitude, the Biden administration quickly reached out to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It so happens that the vast llanos of Venezuela potentially harbour the largest crude oil reserves in the world. The inconvenience of this war is that it has interrupted the forceful removal of Maduro in favour of a non- elected Guaido.
However, East or West, oil is best. And so, even though Uncle Sam has sworn that Maduro is their arch-enemy in the Western hemisphere, these are desperate times calling for desperate actions. It is a good war calculus to keep your friends close and, better still, your Venezuelan adversaries much closer.
There is a great incentive for everyone, whether as participants in the war or as beholders with mild bemusement, to have this conflict stopped, and the toll on Ukrainian human life and the resultant carnage on their socio-economic infrastructure prevented without delay.
The Chinese, notwithstanding their full appreciation of Nato’s unwarranted aggressive expansionist moves, are still not convinced of the long-term strategic benefits of this war.
The Europeans, aghast with disbelief, did not contemplate another war in their backyard. The Russian citizens are not spared. They are ambivalent about the causality rationale of their policy-makers and the long term cultural consequence of this imbroglio.
The Americans, for their part, would rather have a cheaper gallon of gas than this enduring nightmare at the pump. From the latest media reports, the South Africans are readying themselves to do what they do best, help the world negotiate itself out of its moral mire. As for the Ukrainians, they can’t wait to not being killed anymore in spite of their leader’s strategic military and political miscalculations.
In 2017 Rosneft started to build a 3000-kilometre gas pipeline that commences from the steppes of Kovyktinskoye all the way to the Russian-Chinese border in Mogoveshchensk. Dubbed the Power of Siberia, the 1.4-metre wide steel pipeline is destined to deliver 55 billion cubic meters of gas annually.
Another pipeline called the Power of Siberia II is planned, this time to pass through Mongolia, with its terminal point in Shanghai. Its annual payload of 82 billion cubic metres may help rival the gas output destined for Europe. If the Russo-Ukrainian war skirt has many folds, oil and gas relations represent the most eminent pleat.
Of gas supplied to Europe, there is too much of this fugacious substance, whose malodorous political stench engulfs the vast prairies of the Caucasus.
Added to the volatile cocktail of Nato’s military expansionism and Russia’s sovereign survivalist instinct, the perturbed energy supply chain networks were bound to ignite an ignoble global catastrophe that would raise the price of oil and gas to the benefit of Russia and Saudi Arabia on the one hand and to the detriment of everyone else on the other hand.
Lest a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Biden is convened urgently, no amount of praise for Ukrainian resistance will denude this crisis from its pure essence, that of an American puppet mastery through the stringing of a macabre Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy show.
The war may continue to rack up numbers of casualties in their thousands. For as long as the oil prices go down and remain affordably low, the farcical cheer-leading for the ultimate victims, the Ukrainians, will regrettably continue.
On the contrary, none of the Nato members will encourage any more local Ukrainian resistance or bolster their military capabilities if the barrel of oil fetches a princely sum of $200 or more, especially if Russia could be pushed to turn the European oil and gas spigot completely shut. By a Kafka-esque twist of fate, it may mean that only the rising price of oil and gas can stop this war immediately.
Who knew.
Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law.
*The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL or of title sites.
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