As oil nears $100, Saudis snub U.S., stick to Russian pact amid Ukraine crisis
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Rising oil prices and fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine have created a dilemma for Saudi Arabia: Help the West by pumping more crude to tame the market, or stand by a five-year-old oil alliance that is helping Moscow at the expense of Washington.
For now, the world’s largest crude exporter is sticking with Russia.
President Biden has repeatedly called on Persian Gulf producers to pump more oil to reduce gasoline prices that, for Americans, are about twice as high as they were earlier in the pandemic. Those calls have grown more urgent as oil prices have risen toward $100 a barrel for the first time in nearly eight years, and threaten to go higher amid a Russian troop buildup along the Ukrainian border.
Instead, the Saudis have said they won’t pump more than they agreed to last year as part of a deal between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia, an alliance called OPEC+. That pact allows for production increases of 400,000 barrels a day each month, but it has done little to stem the rise in oil prices, and the Saudis have pumped less than their share, according to the International Energy Agency. [Continue reading…]
No Russian troops were withdrawn from the border with Ukraine, a senior Biden administration official told reporters Wednesday night, disputing Moscow’s claim that it was pulling back some forces.
“We now know it was false,” the official said, adding that as many as 7,000 troops have joined the 150,000 already near the border in recent days.
The official called the Russian claims that it was pulling back more forces from around Ukraine “false” and gave one of the grimmest assessments yet for the possibility of reaching a diplomatic solution to avoid war. [Continue reading…]