American sanctions might be giving the Kremlin a major export blockage. The Financial Times reports that Russia has taken to storing natural gas pumped from the Arctic Circle because getting it to customers has proven too difficult.
The newspaper suggests that satellite imagery and ship-tracking data provoke the conclusion that the privately held energy firm Novatek can’t find anyone to take the resource off its hands, a blow to Arctic LNG 2, a signature drilling effort by President Vladimir Putin.
Russia may be propping up its economy through aggressive military spending amid its invasion of Ukraine, but its GDP still depends on exporting natural resources. Sanctions levied in response to that invasion by the United States and Europe, first against Russia itself then by a so-called “shadow fleet” of secretive entities used to do its bidding, may be having more of an effect than previously thought.
The U.S. State Department gave itself a pat on the back Thursday for slowing things down at LNG 2: “Working alongside our G7 partners and other allies, we will remain steadfast in countering Russia’s exploitation of its energy resources for political gain.”