#Gazprom #collapses #sign #crisis #Russian #economy
A first, clear sign of suffering for the Russian economy. The collapse of Gazprom, the energy giant which for at least twenty years has had a weight that goes well beyond the sector in which it operates, is not just the crisis of a state company. It is also a warning light that lights up unequivocally regarding the state of health of Moscow’s industrial and financial machine. If up to now the war economy, with expenditure on war production supporting the GDP, has masked the consequences of over two years of war in Ukraine, the loss of 629 billion rubles (equal to 6.9 billion dollars) in 2023 for Gazprom it may mark the end of a narrative that even Kremlin propaganda is now struggling to spread.
For a number of reasons. The main one is that this is the first time since Alexei Miller, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarchs, took control of the company in 2001. It hasn’t happened for more than twenty years and the proportion of the collapse has been lost year on year over 30% of revenues and gas sales halved without the increase in oil sales being able to compensate for them, cannot be dismissed as a physiological oscillation. It should be read as the plastic representation of the hole that the stop to supplies to Europe has caused, not only in Gazprom’s balance sheet but also in the financial capacity of one of the Kremlin’s main strategic resources.
The other data that should be highlighted is the distance between the actual results and the analysts’ estimates. No one predicted such a collapse. How was this possible? Once again, the answer must be sought in the difficult interpretation of numbers, which so far have described a much less compromised picture than the one the data describe today.
The news of the collapse of Gazprom’s revenues and profits also recalls the always heated debate on the effectiveness of European sanctions against Russia. The gas giant is certainly one of the most exposed entities, practically unable to evade the total restrictions towards the Western outlet market, both because it is difficult to compensate with oil as the flows have shown, and because it is practically impossible to replace with new supplies towards east due to the lack of infrastructure.
However, the Gazprom case is also linked to the wrong calculations of the Western front, which did not deal well with the triangulations that allowed Moscow to circumvent sanctions in many other sectors. Of course, if on the military front Ukraine’s strength seems to be increasingly wavering, the cost that Russia is paying for the war is starting to rise more clearly. (By Fabio Insenga)
