Oil prices rose on Thursday after Ukraine carried out another strike on Russian oil infrastructure, and as US-brokered peace talks in Moscow yielded scarce progress.
Kyiv’s military campaign against Russian oil refineries “has shifted into a more sustained and strategically coordinated phase,” the consulting firm Kpler reported, which will likely bring more pain for Russian drivers. But so far it’s clearly not enough to change the Kremlin’s calculus. For now, Moscow appears to be betting that it can use the prospect of new fossil fuel and mineral deals to entice the Trump administration — specifically the real estate developers-turned-lead negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — to ramp up pressure on Kyiv to accept major concessions.
But as Semafor’s Ben Smith noted, there’s little reason to believe that a new era of US-Russia business deals would pan out any better than they have in the last three decades, especially after European leaders agreed this week to accelerate their timeline for ending all Russian gas imports. “It’s the stupidest thing ever,” Bill Browder, once the biggest foreign investor in Russia and now a bitter Putin critic, told Smith, “to think the Russians will let Americans get a single penny out of this.”