The United States should not tell Saudi Arabia how to manage its crude oil production, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.
"Saudi Arabia is a sovereign state, a responsible state, and a very important player in the international energy markets. Of course, this sovereign state is capable of making decisions that concern its own economy. Hardly anyone, even the US, should lecture (Saudi Arabia) on how to be in this or that case," Peskov said in a Moscow press briefing on Friday.
Saudi Arabia voluntarily agreed over the weekend to cut the country's crude oil production targets for the month of July by an additional 1 million barrels per day. President Biden did not make any noteworthy response to the decision, with oil prices only briefly rallying in response to the oil production curtailments.
Peskov's rebuke, then, does not follow any new backlash from U.S. President Joe Biden. A rather way back response to OPEC's oil cuts came in October 2022, when President Biden threatened "consequences."
In the same press briefing, Peskov also said that its Russian atomic energy sector would continue developing despite the US and UK forming a new economic alliance that looks to box out Russia from the international nuclear energy markets. Peskov referred to the situation as "unfair competition."
President Biden and PM Sunak signed a declaration on Thursday on the new pact "for a new age", referred to as the New Atlantic Declaration, Sunak said of the deal that it was a deal "of a kind that has never been agreed before," adding that it included $17.5 billion in new U.S. investments that were promised to the UK.
A UK government document providing details about the deal says in part, "We face new challenges to international stability - from authoritarian states such as Russia and the People's Republic of China (PRC); disruptive technologies; non-state actors; and transnational challenges like climate change."
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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Comments
However, if the New Atlantic Declaration aims to box out Russia from the international nuclear energy markets as the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov suggested, then it will fail miserably for the following reasons.
1- Russia has access to China, the world’s largest economy and also the biggest market.
2- While Western countries have imposed sanctions on Russia, the rest of the world refused to do so.
3- It is virtually impossible to exclude Russia from the international nuclear energy markets. Russian state-operated nuclear energy company Rosatom is a world leader in nuclear technology, the world’s largest exporter of nuclear reactors and a global exporter of nuclear fuel. Moreover, it is expanding its global business and is already involved in building 15 more nuclear plants internationally.
4- The Atlantic declaration between the United States and the UK will touch a raw nerve in the EU exactly as the nuclear submarines deal between the US, UK and Australia angered France.
Dr Mamdouh G Salameh
International Oil Economist
Global Energy Expert