Putin's meeting with the prince, known as MbS, comes after
oil prices fell despite a pledge by OPEC Plus, which groups the Organization of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies led by Russia, to further cut
output.
Putin
arrived in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday for talks President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed
Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi. He is due to then travel to Saudi Arabia for his first
face-to-face meeting with MbS since October 2019.
The Kremlin said they would discuss energy cooperation,
including as part of OPEC Plus, whose members pump more than 40% of the world's
oil.
"Close Russian-Saudi coordination in this format is a
reliable guarantee of maintaining a stable and predictable situation in the
global oil market," the Kremlin said.
The
Kremlin's chief's last visit to the region was in July 2022, when he met
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran.
It was not immediately clear what Putin, who has rarely left
Russia since the start of the Ukraine war, intends to discuss with the crown
prince of the world's largest oil exporter, just days after disagreements
delayed a key OPEC Plus meeting.
They will also discuss the war between Israel and Hamas
militants, the situation in Syria and Yemen, and broader issues like ensuring
stability in the Gulf, the Kremlin said. A Kremlin aide said Ukraine would also
be discussed.
Putin will host
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Moscow on Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry
Peskov said.
Putin and MbS, who together control one-fifth of
the oil pumped each day, have long enjoyed close relations, though both have at
times been ostracised by the West.
At a G20 summit in
2018, just two month after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi
consulate, Putin and MbS high-fived and shook hands with smiles.
MbS, 38, has sought to reassert Saudi Arabia as a
regional power with less deference to the United States, which supplies Riyadh
most of its weapons and which is the world's top producer of oil.
Putin, who sent
troops into Ukraine in February 2022, says Russia is engaged in an existential
battle with the West - and has courted allies across the Middle East, Africa,
Latin America and Asia amid Western attempts to isolate Moscow.
Both MbS and Putin,
71, want and need high prices for oil - the lifeblood of their economies. The
question for both, is how much of the burden each should take on to keep prices
aloft - and how to verify the burden.
OPEC Plus last month delayed its meeting by several
days due to disagreements over production levels by some members. Saudi's
energy minister said OPEC Plus
also wanted more assurances from Moscow it would do good on its pledge to
reduce fuel exports.
Relations between
Saudi and Russia in OPEC Plus
have at times been uneasy and a deal on cuts almost broke down in March 2020,
when the markets were already shaken by the onset of the COVID pandemic.
But the two nations
managed to patch up their relations within weeks and OPEC Plus agreed to record cuts of almost 10% of
global oil demand, to prop up the oil markets.
Since war broke out between Israel and Hamas on October 07, Putin has cast the
conflict as a failure of US policy in the Middle East and has fostered ties
with Arab allies and Iran, as well as with Hamas.
When Russia
intervened in the Syrian Civil War in 2015, it helped tip the balance in Syrian
President Bashar Al-Assad's favour, ensuring the Syrian leader's survival
despite Western demands that he be toppled.
"The Kremlin seeks to build its line of
behaviour taking into account the opinions of the main regional players - Saudi
Arabia, the UAE and Iran, who are not just observers, but also, in a sense,
participants in the situation," Andrey Kortunov of the Russian
International Affairs Council think tank told the Vedomosti newspaper.
No comments:
Post a Comment