Russia and Ukraine flashpoint

[Bofferbrauer2]

shavenferret said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

While it's capped, Russia was due to the low oil prices actually forced to sell quite below their cap recently. Of course now that the prices jump up again and the uncertainty about the oil supply from the middle east means that Russia can sell at the cap again.

And of course, Russia has a large shadow fleet with which they can circumvent the cap entirely and sell at market prices.

All in all, Russia's income will go up significantly if the oil price continues to go up, and the Russian economy desperately needs more funds as their economy is increasingly shaky.

As for the drones, Russia is fully independent from Iran by now. markings on the downed or unexploded drones don't show anything Iranian anymore for over half a year now, only Russian markings, meaning that they are now producing them all domestically.

Also, rockets? The rockets Iran uses are mostly of soviet origin. They can do all of them themselves. Those that aren't are either very old (like the predecessor of the Javelin ATGMs, which the US phased out in 2001 and Iran copied in 2016, or their original Fateh rockets), so Russia has better alternatives already, or very new (like their copy of the Israeli SPIKE or their newer Fateh designs) and thus in low numbers Iran wouldn't have sold anyway. pretty much all rockets Iran has are derived from the Soviet Scud missiles anyway.

Iran was useful for mostly the Shahed drones, which Russia licensed a long time ago. Iran getting attacked will disturb them as much as a fly buzzing around, while the increased money flow more than outshines any inconveniences from losing Iran as a trading partner.

The oil income is doing pretty bad right now from Ukraine's constant attacks on the refineries, and now the worldwide crackdown on the shadow fleet.  

True, but India and China will now certainly buy more Russian oil again, especially if Iran blocks the strait of Hormuz again, and there are pipelines for those. The oil fields east of the Urals are pretty hard to hit for Ukraine due to sheer distance, and refineries are most of the time quickly (as in 1-3 weeks) back at production.