>>2583173 (me)
forgot to mention oil prices also going down due to deregulation, and probably the futures market is fucked until there's been some assessment of venezuelan resistance against the yanks.
also worth unpacking are the "shadow fleet" accusations. nowhere near enough receipts on that one. I mention this because the other big "shadow fleet" story is about a nominally cameroonian vessel that carried a shipment between cuba and venezuela, doggedly sneaking through the seppo blockade to deliver to beleagured venezuela. rather a heroic act.
https://gcaptain.com/sanctioned-russian-tanker-seahorse-reaches-venezuela-following-earlier-u-s-navy-blockade/transporting russian oil isn't illegal: there aren't UNSC sanctions in place so people can buy and sell as much of the shit as they want provided their vessel and the party they're selling to aren't bound by autonomous sanctions.
the west has barred its own vessels from a huge chunk of the global oil trade, their shipping companies are liquidating vessels. all the buyers are buying them to move crude from russia to to the third world. this was inevitable. these ships can't be retrofitted to do anything else.
you can't expect people to stop needing electricity or petrochemicals just because they're brown or poor. maybe the russian state bought some of these ships, but it's just as likely that affected states bought them, or the western shipping companies sold them to their own shell companies.
>>2583179right, and the senegalese people can stand to eat the cost of missing shipments and the ecological fallout of fuck knows how much spilled crude?