© Getty Images / Norbert Achtelik
Mounting oil demand from some of the world's biggest economies has helped Russia to export almost as much crude as it did before the conflict in Ukraine and subsequent Western sanctions, the
Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
On top of this, rising global crude prices, which have currently settled at around $100 a barrel, have sent Russia's oil revenues skyrocketing."Russia is swimming in cash," Elina Ribakova, the deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, told the journal, adding that the country earned $97 billion from oil and gas sales through July this year, with nearly $74 billion of that coming through sales of crude.
According to data from the International Energy Agency, Russia pumped 7.4 million barrels of crude and products such as diesel and gasoline into the global market each day in July alone. The figure is down only about 600,000 barrels per day since the start of the year.
Russian energy exports have been booming, as the nation managed to find "new buyers, new means of payment, new traders and new ways of financing exports," the media outlet reports, citing oil traders, former Russian industry executives, and shipping officials.
Comment: The food supply has taken a beating in recent years both from natural disasters, such as the increase in extreme weather events, and manmade crises, like the sanctions, lockdowns, and the soaring cost of energy and fertilisers.
Taken together with these food processing plant fires, the majority of which have been happening in the US, and particularly in the last year or so, and now with the West's brazen attack on farmers, it's reasonable to suspect that whilst incompetence plays its part, there is also an ongoing and concerted effort by some to bring about deadly food shortages: