A first, clear, sign of suffering for the Russian economy. The collapse of Gazprom, the energy giant that has had a weight that goes well beyond the sector in which it operates for at least twenty years, 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 to support the GDP, has masked the consequences of more than two years of war in Ukrainethe loss of 629 billion rubles (equivalent to $6.9 billion) in 2023 for Gazprom 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 the closest oligarchs Vladimir Putin, took control of the company in 2001. It hadn’t happened for more than twenty years and the proportion of the collapse, over 30% of revenues were lost year on year and gas sales were halved without the increase in sales of oil could compensate for them, it cannot be archived 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. Nobody expected such a collapse. How was this possible? Once again, the answer must be sought in difficult interpretation of numberswhich so far have described a much less compromised picture than what the data describes today.
The news of the collapse of Gazprom’s revenues and profits also recalls the always heated debate oneffectiveness 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)
