Global oil prices crashed nearly 18% in 2025—Brent’s steepest fall since 2020 and its third consecutive annual loss, a losing streak unprecedented in the benchmark’s history, Reuters reported. Cheap oil hurts any producer.
For Russia, it’s catastrophic—because Moscow isn’t just fighting a bad market. It’s fighting Ukrainian drones and Western sanctions at the same time.
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None of it lasted. German industry analysts noted that despite constant geopolitical tension, 2025 saw no sustained supply disruptions—risk premiums were priced out as quickly as they appeared.
Structural forces prevailed: US shale production reached new records, OPEC+ added 2.9 million barrels per day to the market since April, and Chinese demand stagnated.
Ukraine is ultimately an oil war, not to obtain oil but to force Russia out of a shrinking market of buyers. Given this framing it is easy to see why Russia is isolating itself by insisting on being the oil power to be given the boot out of world oil markets. Even worse for Russia, China is leading the vanguard of the green energy revolution and Russia has done zilch, nada, NOTHING to prepare for it... and China is supposedly their ally?
This is a dead end for Russia and it is stunning see such a major military power break its back upon denial about an inveitable future.
Also consider how Trump attacking Venezuela for BS reasons fits into this perspective as an attempt by Trump to force Venezuela out of the worlds oil markets as a supplier and prop up the price of oil for Putin and US oil companies.
https://earth.org/russia-renewable-energy/
The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, and no one is seeing this more clearly than Russia. Home to more than a fifth of the planet’s forests, the world’s fourth-biggest greenhouse gas emitter, Russia has experienced two consecutive years of record-breaking wildfires that released emissions equivalent to those of medium-sized countries like Spain. Additionally, permafrost is thawing fast, damaging infrastructure and housing. However, it seems as though Russia has no plans to invest heavily in renewable energy, choosing instead to focus on natural gas, which is generally non-renewable. How will being left behind in the global dash for clean energy affect the country?
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Entire regions in Russia are dependent on coal or oil for jobs and the social infrastructure that companies still maintain, a legacy of the Soviet era. In recent years, Russia has bet its economic and geopolitical future on natural gas, building new pipelines to China, Turkey and Germany. It wants to own a quarter of the global LNG market, up from 0% in 2008 to around 8% today, especially as oil and gas producers are struggling to make a profit amid falling crude oil prices.
It was this choice to double down on fossil fuels that made war and downfall inveitable for Russia.