Moscow reportedly offers Trump deal regarding natural resources
Pravda Ukraine
The Kremlin has offered Donald Trump’s team a deal on Russian natural resources.
Source: The Moscow Times
Details: Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, said that Russia was interested in joint projects with the United States in the Arctic.
He also stressed that US oil companies used to run a “very successful business” in Russia, but lost about US$300 billion due to sanctions.
“We believe that at some point they will come back, because why would they give up the opportunity to access Russian natural resources that Russia gave them?” Dmitriev said.
Prior to the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, ExxonMobil was the only major American company involved in oil production in Russia. It owned 30% of the Sakhalin-1 project, but after the introduction of sanctions, it announced its withdrawal. However, it was unable to sell its stake, and the Kremlin extended the deadline twice, the last time until the end of 2026.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, major American oilfield service companies such as Halliburton, Schlumberger and Baker Hughes also announced their exit from the market. It was thanks to their technological support that Russia was able to resume production after the Soviet Union crisis ended.
Putin demanded that by 2025, the country should have developed its own hydrocarbon drilling and exploration technologies, and that their share should reach 80%.
However, in reality, more than half of the equipment for hydraulic fracturing, a technology that allows for increased well recovery and extraction of hard-to-reach oil, is still supplied by “unfriendly” countries. And some items, such as rotary steerable systems, are 100% imported.
Read more: Trading metals for security: which resources interest Trump, and what can Ukraine offer?
Background: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejected the US offer to transfer the rights to about 50% of Ukrainian rare earth minerals to the US, as the deal did not have clear security guarantees from the US.
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