Oil Crash: Saudi Arabia's Russia Battle Won't End Quickly - Bloomberg:
Saudi Arabia’s new oil strategy — a short, sharp shock to cow Russia — looks very much like its Yemen military strategy — a short, sharp shock meant to cow the Houthi rebels. The chances of it being any more successful are slim.
Saudi Arabia’s new oil strategy — a short, sharp shock to cow Russia — looks very much like its Yemen military strategy — a short, sharp shock meant to cow the Houthi rebels. The chances of it being any more successful are slim.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of the kingdom, is gearing up to use the might of Saudi Arabia’s oil production capacity to deliver a crushing blow to rival producers. His aim appears to be to drive oil prices down so far and so fast that Russia realizes it made a terrible mistake in refusing to agree to deepen output cuts at Friday’s OPEC+ gathering, bringing more than three years of supply management to an abrupt and unexpected end.
In Yemen, MBS, as the Crown Prince is known, launched “Operation Decisive Storm” in 2015, using Saudi military power to inflict a devastating attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. The campaign’s aim was to destroy the rebels and pave the way for the quick restoration of Saudi-backed and internationally recognized head of state, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.
It didn’t turn out to be quite so decisive. Five years later, the conflict drags on. The Houthis remain in control of a large part of the country and President Hadi is still in exile, while Yemen’s civilian population bears the brunt of the fighting, with three-quarters of the population needing humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Meanwhile, the Houthis have taken the fight to Saudi Arabia, claiming responsibility for last year’s attacks on oil processing plants at Abqaiq and Khurais and the strategic East-West pipeline.
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