Although Vladimir Putin’s Russia will stand or fall in Siberia’s oil and gas fields, it is first necessary to mention some of the other contingencies the Russian authorities must factor into their ongoing analyses.

First off are elements of the Ukrainian war, where captured NATO mercenaries have escaped the death penalty, where the British Special Boat Service continue to sink Russian battleships and where the German government, which threatens to steal billions of dollars in Russian assets, is fully complicit in its Norwegian and American bosses blowing up Germany’s own Nordstream pipeline infrastructure.

Given gross provocations like those, there are understandable murmurings in Russia that Putin is too much of a softie, that Russia must teach Norway, Britain, Germany and NATO’s other willing executioners some very harsh lessons.

Allied to all that is the lenient way Russian authorities are treating the dissidents NATO have hired to undermine Russian civil society. Let’s first of all look at Ekaterina Duntsova, a journalist whose dodgy resume reminds me of some Irish dissident journalists who, despite being able to prove the earth is flat (otherwise kangaroos would fall off), have their own gullible followers.

Although Putin should probably treat that broken creature with the kids’ gloves she needs, not only do the Pussy Riot clowns need the harshest of tough love but the Cossacks who arrested them at Sochi should take refresher courses on what it means to be a Cossack. Here is the first lesson for those Cossacks: you should no longer take any shit from these overpaid slatterns, who are currently touring Texas and California. Your turf, your rules.

Allied to those paid criminals and the sad state of today’s Cossacks is the case of Alexei Navalny, who has been the subject of several previous SCF articles and editorials and who, being another CIA asset, has received all the usual plaudits and prizes Amnesty International and the CIA’s other front groups dish out. Although MI6’s BBC reports here that this bum is being held in an Arctic prison, what is he doing live broadcasting his propaganda to the world? Is he being held in a prison or in a Siberian television studio?

All of these are nuisances the Russian authorities must deal with before getting on to oil and gas, their main business and, though Russians might agree or disagree on how robustly these Trojan Horses should be handled, as long as they do not gain significant traction, even today’s emasculated Cossacks should be able to handle them.

The same does not apply to Siberia’s vast riches, which may be broken down into its stock of wealth and its flow of wealth. As things currently stand, Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller has recently reported to Russian President Putin that Russia’s exports of natural gas to China are seeing a year-on-year increase of as much as 50% and that the Power of Siberia mega pipeline is breaking all records in supplying China with Siberian gas as part of Gazprom’s 2014 $400 billion, 30-year deal with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), to whom we shall shortly return to excoriate them.

If we take into account Gazprom’s transit gas pipeline through Mongolia, Russia’s gas exports to China are projected to grow to 100 billion cubic meters annually. China now accounts for 50% of Russia’s energy exports, while India accounts for a further 40%. Win-win, or win-win-win if we include India in our crayon and colouring book analysis and if we ignore the considerable Nordstream-related risks staring us right there in the face.

Depending almost exclusively on China and India and sending pipelines through CIA targeted Mongolia are not signs of good diversification procedures; they are weaknesses those who blew up Nordstream fully appreciate. If NATO can severely disrupt the flow of oil from Siberia (and Northern Russia) to China and India, or if NATO can ensure the stocks of gas and oil buried beneath Siberia’s ice stay buried there, then that is a clear win for NATO’s oil producers and brokers in NATO’s campaign against China, its ultimate enemy.

NATO then has a number of Northern Russia and Siberia-related tasks. They are to keep its Pussy Rioters, its Navalnys and its other flat earthers on the boil, to keep the Russian Armed Forces mired in Ukraine, to consider how best to disrupt and, if possible, to destroy more of Russia’s critical oil and gas infrastructure and, as we now discuss, to stop more oil and gas coming online.

In the eye of the storm is Northern Russia’s Arctic LNG2 Project, which is being developed in Gydan by its owner OOO Arctic Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), which is a company formed by NOVATEK (60%), TotalEnergies (10%), CNPC (10%), CNOOC (10%) and the Japan Arctic LNG (10%), which is a consortium of Mitsui and JOGMEC. The project involves the development of the Utrenneye onshore oil and gas condensate field and an LNG liquefaction plant in the Gydan peninsula. The total investment required is $21.3bn, serious money, needing an equally serious return on investment.

As this excellent article explains, this is a very complicated project which, with the help of top German, Italian and Chinese concerns, must overcome incredible engineering and mechanical hurdles to extract the gas and export it to West Europe, from where Russian interests have already been excluded by sanctions and by the criminal actions of the Norwegian and British Armed Forces, for whom international arrest warrants should be issued.

Although this equally informed article recounts how the Russians have made considerable progress in overcoming the loss of its German, Italian and other Western partners, the fact remains that the Americans, helped by their hired British and Norwegian murderers, have killed any chance of moving that gas into the European markets America has recently colonised.

And, though China could break the deadlock by building ice breakers to move the gas eastwards, China is playing its own neo-mercantilist games, bowing and salaming to the Yanks in the face of their threatened sanctions.

Although Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning says that China’s involvement in Russia’s Arctic LNG 2 liquefied natural gas project “should not be interfered with or restricted by any third party,” one must really wonder at her naivety where all foreign shareholders in this project – France’s TotalEnergies, the China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), China’s CNOOC, and a consortium of Mitsui and JOGMEC from Japan – have already declared force majeure on their participation, meaning that the four shareholders, who each own a 10% stake, have renounced their responsibilities for financing the plant and fulfilling offtake contracts for the supply of LNG it produces.

If that were not bad enough, CNOOC and CNPC, the two Chinese companies involved in the project, have both begged the U.S. government to exempt them from sanctions on Arctic LNG 2 as they seek to prevent disruption to crucial fuel flows. To get some idea of how embarrassing these Chinese are, here is a map of the world showing the United States and all the various countries of the world currently under sanctions by the United States.

The Chinese are either too stupid or too arrogant to think they alone should be exempt from all that and they are too myopic to see other storms, such as this $25 billion investment by Intel into Israel, forming on their horizons, little Chinese rabbits running into the noose NATO has set to snare them and their expansionist dreams as they face into their appropriately named Year of the Rat and the diverse challenges it brings.

One such challenge is the degree to which China will cooperate with Russia and the degree to which it will defy NATO’s sanctions, most particularly over investing in and developing Siberian oil and gas.

The Chinese had already decided that Arctic LNG 2 was a feasible project and, perhaps, all the more so now that its other stakeholders have abandoned ship. The question then remaining is how to covertly finance it with the least possible disruption to other Chinese interests. And, though suggestions could be made in that regard, at day’s end, it all boils down to China making an honourable stand with Russia and telling NATO, thus far shalt thou go and no further.

Irrespective of whether the Chinese jump ship in Siberia or not, they should be under no illusions about the future NATO have planned for them. Once NATO cut off their Russian gas and oil supplies and boot them out one way or another from some of their key markets, then China will know, perhaps too late, they have a fight to the death on their hands unless they prefer, as many of them do, to revert to serf status, something Putin and Russia have quite rightly rejected.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/12/29/siberian-oil-gas-sanctions-at-heart-of-ukraine-war/

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