Editorial: Can You Really Ostracise A Golden Goose?

(What is good for one is good for the other) Russian proverb

As talks have been announced between Ukraine’s "Chocolate King", Petro Poroshenko, and Vladimir Putin in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, shots are being exchanged on another battlefield: the economic front.

With trade restrictions tightened on the Russian Federation after the apparent downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 by Russian separatists, barrages of sanctions from Washington and Brussels have been answered with a volley of embargoes from Moscow.

So far, Russia has imposed a one-year long full embargo on all imports of food from the West. At 13 per cent, foodstuffs comprise Russia’s largest share of imports, and the embargo has caused up to a 10 per cent rise in domestic food pricing. By the same token, the ban has also brought struggling UK dairy farmers to their knees.

And worse may be to come in the skies. Russia has already closed its airspace to all Ukrainian aircraft - a blanket ban on all western air traffic from the country that makes up 11 per cent of the world’s total landmass could entail dire economic consequences.

Yet despite frayed nerves and Cold War-level political standoffishness, paradoxically, collaboration on the oil and gas front seems to be eerily smooth. Russian state-owned energy giant, Rosneft, has begun exploratory drilling alongside Statoil with its Pingvin-1 well in the Norwegian sector of the Barents Sea, and Russian EPC Summa Group has signed on to construct a 3.1 million cubic metre capacity oil terminal in the Port of Rotterdam.

It seems that sauce for the goose is indeed sauce for the gander, and nobody wants to kill the waterfowl that lays the black golden egg….

Will the sanctions war mean much, if anything, to joint ventures in the oil and gas sector? Have your say here

Tim Haðdar is the Editor In Chief at Oil & Gas IQ. Reach Him At Twitter Or OGIQ

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