This includes for those people who were sufficiently trusting of MbS to buy shares in Aramco’s recent IPO.
Russia’s major oil producer, Rosneft, has been begging President Putin to allow it to produce and sell more oil since the OPEC+ arrangement was first agreed in December 2016 Saudi’s major oil producer, Aramco, only suffers value-destruction in such a scenario. Russia can produce over 11 million barrels per day (mbpd) of oil without figuratively breaking sweat Saudi’s average from 1973 to right now is just over 8 mbpd. In purely basic oil economics terms, Russia has a budget breakeven price of US$40 per barrel of Brent this year: Saudi’s is US$84. Whichever way the oil price war pans out, Russia wins. There is a phrase in Russian intelligence circles for clueless people that are ruthlessly used without their knowledge in covert operations, which is ‘a useful idiot’, and it is hard to think of anyone more ‘useful’ in this context to the Russians than whoever came up with Saudi’s latest ‘plan’.
One might reasonably posit that when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) signalled that Saudi Arabia was once again going to produce oil to the maximum to crash oil prices in a full-scale oil price war, Russian President Vladimir Putin probably fell off the horse he was riding bare-chested somewhere in Siberia because he was laughing so much.