Another senior executive in the Russian energy sector has died .
This Russian named Ravil Maganov is the vice president of the largest private oil company in Russia. He is also the chairman of the board of directors of the company. He is a very powerful person.
Mr. Maganov fell to his death from the 6th floor of the hospital. The Russian side is currently investigating the cause of Mr. Maganov's death.
But a very noteworthy issue is that Mr. Maganov is the eighth energy executive to die in Russia this year. The death circumstances of the other seven are also somewhat doubtful. Is it possible that
is due to human factors? Do not exclude .
If it is human factors, who did it? In other words, who has the motive to do it?
These people are high-level people in Russian energy companies and have a strong influence on the Russian energy field. The mainstay of Russia's economy is energy exports.
So the first level of inference: These people are the black hands of some countries that want to bring down the Russian economy..
This is an easy inference to draw, because the mainstay of Russia's economy is energy exports. If the Russian energy field cannot maintain stability, it will be difficult to maintain normal energy exports .
This is an unbearable blow to the Russian economy, which is already not very prosperous.
And if some country uses these disgraceful means to attack these senior figures in the Russian energy field, and cooperates with economic sanctions and other means, it is very likely to destroy Russia's energy stability .
From this perspective, if Russian energy executives die one after another, and there are human factors behind it, the possibility of it coming from hostile forces outside Russia is not small.
But why does the author say that this is the first level of inference? Because reality is always much more complicated than theory .
If these Russian energy executives are all people who work hard for Russia, then our first level of inference can be established.
However, since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, many oligarchs -style economic figures have appeared in Russia.
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, these people embezzled a large amount of resources that were originally Soviet state-owned assets, and thus took control of the economic lifeline of the newly born Russia .
Since Putin came to power, combating the oligarchic economy that endangers Russia's national security is one of Putin's major actions.
What is even more disturbing is that in order to fight Putin and protect their own assets, some Russian oligarchs even secretly colluded with Western countries .
Their actions include, but are not limited to, transferring their assets (most of which should belong to the Russian state) to Western countries, betraying Russian political and economic interests, etc.
In the energy field, people like this are not uncommon in Russia..
Because we don’t know what kind of characters these Russian executives are below the surface, whether they stand with Russia or with Western countries.
So we have a second level of inference: we cannot rule out the possibility that Putin ordered to eliminate people who endanger Russia's national security.
In our opinion, doing this to clear up internal problems may be too violent, but for Russia, this may not be so unusual.
There is no shortage of this kind of behavior in Russian history, and Putin himself is born from the famous KGB. Secondly, Russia is now in a state of war, and needs to solve certain problems as quickly as possible .
Of course, no matter what the real reason behind it is, from the death of a Russian energy executive, we can see the importance of energy issues to Russia, as well as Europe and the United States.
The three pillars of human civilization are energy, materials and information.
In modern society, fossil energy still occupies a dominant position, especially in Europe where the construction of new energy fields has not been progressing smoothly in recent years and is not very willing to accept nuclear energy.
And Europe happens to not be a major producer of fossil energy. needs to import large amounts of oil and natural gas to meet the needs of European countries.
In the international energy market, Europe is in a weak buyer position .
And Russia is rich in resources. It is the world's leading oil and natural gas producer and exporter . Previously, most of Europe's natural gas relied on Russian exports.
The United States was also a major energy importer before, importing a large amount of oil resources from the Middle East and other regions. For this reason, the US military also fought many wars in the Middle East.
In recent years, the United States has made breakthroughs in shale oil mining technology ( or relaxed environmental protection requirements ), which allows the United States to exploit the rich shale oil resources in the United States.
These shale oil resources allowed the United States to quickly increase its oil production capacity, in turn becoming the world's major oil exporter .
The United States exports a large amount of oil, which is also the main reason for the increase in conflicts between the United States and Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern oil-producing countries.
After the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, European countries stopped importing natural gas from Russia for political reasons.
This approach has brought about two significant changes:
European countries are highly dependent on Russian natural gas. They stopped importing natural gas, causing heavy damage to the economies of European countries. , the UK's GDP has been surpassed by India.
European countries do not need to import Russian natural gas, but they must solve their own energy problems, so increase the amount of oil imported from the United States to make up for the natural gas gap, which makes the United States make a lot of money.
But natural gas is natural gas, and oil is oil. It is difficult for European countries to completely replace natural gas with oil.
For example, in gas turbine power stations in countries such as Germany, their gas turbines are built according to the standards of burning natural gas. To switch to using oil as fuel requires a lot of modification work.
So while European politicians ostensibly stopped importing Russian natural gas to show their attitude, privately still purchased natural gas from Russia through other countries.
For example, energy companies in China and the United States import natural gas from Russia and then resell it to European countries. The natural gas does not even have to go to Chinese and American ports, but is shipped directly from Russia to Europe.
The price Europe pays for this is higher gas bills while for Russia there is little impact.
This is obviously not good for the United States, so the United States wants to mess up Russia's energy production and exports , making it difficult for European countries to obtain enough natural gas even at high prices.
In this way, European countries will have more urgent demand for American oil, and European countries will therefore be even more inseparable from American control . This is the calculation of the United States.
Regarding the energy issue, the game between Russia and the United States will continue. No matter who loses or wins, Europe will suffer the most.
