Yet at last week’s OPEC+ meeting, tensions began to emerge. Saudi officials have reportedly been growing increasingly annoyed that, rather than cut its oil output by 500,000 barrels a day as agreed at an OPEC+ meeting in April, Russia was instead flooding the market with discounted oil to fund its struggling economy and the “special military operation” it is steadily losing.

Russia’s goal, it seems, is to get OPEC members to push oil prices as high as possible so it can undercut them all below the capped level at which it is officially allowed to sell oil due to G7 restrictions. That strategy appears to be working for now: India and China are gorging on Russian crude at record rates, ignoring Western sanctions, and OPEC’s core members have been losing market share.

But this is a dangerous game for Russia.

[Putin could write a book on how to lose friends and influence these days. It’s become clear that Putin never calculated for the economic necessities of a long war, and double-crossing OPEC will make those shortcomings even more acute. This is an inexcusable failure of leadership. Even if Putin thought he could win a quick military conquest in Ukraine, he had to know that the EU would cut off economic cooperation, and that he’d have to fight a partisan war in occupying Ukraine. — Ed]