Ukraine: military (Aug '14 to mid-June '15) closed

[Dayuhan]

JMA---notice the Russian FM comments on "receiving the US call" concerning the "humanitarian convoy" that was not an "invasion force" from my previous link.

Cryptic was all one can say about his comment--would have been interesting to have learned what the US told Russia on that call? Word has it that just minutes after the US called the Russians informed the US that the convoy had indeed stopped.

If a mere phone call from the US can force the Russians to abort a plan, they must be seriously running scared, and whatever the US is doing must be working.

Secondly, I for one believe the reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union was the price of Russian sour crude collapsing under pressure of the KSA that opened the flow of sour crude and drove the price down for a long period thus denying Russian an extremely large amount of cash flow that they had planned for their internal budget.

Thus the SU collapse---now what is interesting is who together with the KSA thought up that pricing maneuver?

The oil glut and the price crash were certainly a major cause of the Soviet collapse, but nobody "thought it up". If you look at the data it wasn't just the KSA that increased production: almost all producers did. The price started dropping, and producers pumped more to try to cover their budgets, depressing the price further. OPEC tried to stop it by tightening quotas, but the quotas were ignored, across the board. Classic case of short-term thinking and distrust for other members of the cartel: the interests of all would have been best served if everybody had cut production to support the price, but nobody trusted the others to follow their quotas and nobody wanted to be the fool who cut production and then got shot down by the combination of low production and a lower price.

The oil glut was catastrophic for all producers, including the Saudis; I don't think there's a serious oil analyst anywhere who believes that it was deliberately contrived as a weapon.