Dr. Stephen Blank: Global coronavirus outbreak reaches Russia

Dr. Stephen Blank, Senior Fellow for Russia at the American Foreign Policy Council, joins Secure Freedom Radio to discuss how Russia, alongside Saudi Arabia, is targeting the US energy sector amidst the coronavirus outbreak:

“The Russians and the Saudis since 2016 have been cooperating to keep oil prices at a reasonably high level and to suppress production in order to maximize their revenue outlets. The problem for the Russians is that by doing that they unintentionally allowed for American producers, who are extremely efficient, to also make a fortune and to gain market share in the energy sector at their expense. Along comes the coronavirus which depressed demand in China and now is going to depress demand globally on a massive scale. From the early stages, Russia sees there is an opportunity here for them to break with OPED and have a market share war. They are going to flood the market with oil because energy is the main contributor to the Russian economy and they have nothing else going for them but oil and gas. They’ve got to produce as much as possible.”

Dr. Blank later explains why Russia will not be spared from the COVID-19 outbreak:

“No, Russia has not been spared. First of all, when the first cases came out of China they started closing the border in the far east. Second, there are not as many Chinese in the far east as people like to assume. Third, last week they moved into high gear because they are starting to see the same pattern we had in the US. We started with a few cases and that doubled every day and eventually exploded. Russia is already in crisis. You are not going to read about the full extent of the crisis. The Russian healthcare system is a disaster in many ways. I will give you one example from a recent CSIS paper which claims 1 in 3 hospitals in Russia do not have running water. They are going to try to conceal the extent of the virus, just as China and Iran have.”

Listen to the full show here