Oil and Gas

A months-long siege on the Malian capital, Bamako, by the armed al-Qaeda affiliate group, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), has brought the city to breaking point, causing desperation among residents and, according to analysts, placing increasing pressure on the military government to negotiate with the group – something it has refused to do before now.

JNIM’s members have created an effective economic and fuel blockade by sealing off major highways used by tankers to transport fuel from neighbouring Senegal and the Ivory Coast to the landlocked Sahel country since September.

While JNIM has long laid siege to towns in other parts of the country, this is the first time it has used the tactic on the capital city.

The scale of the blockade, and the immense effect it has had on the city, is a sign of JNIM’s growing hold over Mali and a step towards the group’s stated aim of government change in Mali, Beverly Ochieng, Sahel analyst with intelligence firm Control Risks, told Al Jazeera.

For weeks, most of Bamako’s residents have been unable to buy any fuel for cars or motorcycles as supplies have dried up, bringing the normally bustling capital to a standstill. Many have had to wait in long fuel queues. Last week, the United States and the United Kingdom both advised their citizens to leave Mali and evacuated non-essential diplomatic staff.

Other Western nations have also advised their citizens to leave the country. Schools across Mali have closed and will remain shut until November 9 as staff struggle to commute. Power cuts have intensified.

Here’s what we know about the armed group responsible and why it appears to have Mali in a chokehold:

What is JNIM?

JNIM is the Sahel affiliate of al-Qaeda and the most active armed group in the region, according to conflict monitor ACLED. The group was formed in 2017 as a merger between groups that were formerly active against French and Malian forces that were first deployed during an armed rebellion in northern Mali in 2012. They include Algeria-based al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) and three Malian armed groups – Ansar Dine, Al-Murabitun and Katiba Macina.

JNIM’s main aim is to capture and control territory and to expel Western influences in its region of control. Some analysts suggest that JNIM may be seeking to control major capitals and, ultimately, to govern the country as a whole.

It is unclear how many fighters the group has. The Washington Post has reported estimates of about 6,000, citing regional and western officials.

However, Ulf Laessing, Sahel analyst at the German think tank, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), said JNIM most likely does not yet have the military capacity to capture large, urban territories that are well protected by soldiers. He also said the group would struggle to appeal to urban populations who may not hold the same grievances against the government as some rural communities.

While JNIM’s primary base is Mali, KAS revealed in a report that the group has Algerian roots via its members of the Algeria-based al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM).

The group is led by Iyad Ag-Ghali, a Malian and ethnic Tuareg from Mali’s northern Kidal region who founded Ansar Dine in 2012. That group’s stated aim was to impose its interpretation of Islamic law across Mali.

Ghali had previously led Tuareg uprisings against the Malian government, which is traditionally dominated by the majority Bambara ethnic group, in the early 1990s, demanding the creation of a sovereign country called Azawad.

However, he reformed his image by acting as a negotiator between the government and the rebels. In 2008, he was posted as a Malian diplomat to Saudi Arabia under the government of Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure. When another rebellion began in 2012, however, Ghali sought a leadership role with the rebels but was rebuffed, leading him to create Ansar Dine.

According to the US Department of National Intelligence (DNI), Ghali has stated that JNIM’s strategy is to expand its presence across West Africa and to put down government forces and rival armed groups, such as the Mali-based Islamic State Sahel, through guerrilla-style attacks and the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Simultaneously, it attempts to engage with local communities by providing them with material resources. Strict dress codes and bans on music are common in JNIM-controlled areas.

JNIM also destroys infrastructure, such as schools, communication towers and bridges, to weaken the government off the battlefield.

An overall death toll is unclear, but the group has killed thousands of people since 2017. Human rights groups accuse it of attacking civilians, especially people perceived to be assisting government forces. JNIM activity in Mali caused 207 deaths between January and April this year, according to ACLED data.

How has JNIM laid siege to Bamako?

JNIM began blocking oil tankers carrying fuel to Bamako in September.

That came after the military government in Bamako banned small-scale fuel sales in all rural areas – except at official service stations – from July 1. Usually, in these areas, traders can buy fuel in jerry cans, which they often resell later.

The move to ban this was aimed at crippling JNIM’s operations in its areas of control by limiting its supply lines and, thus, its ability to move around.

At the few places where fuel is still available in Bamako, prices soared last week by more than 400 percent, from $25 to $130 per litre ($6.25-$32.50 per gallon). Prices of transportation, food and other commodities have risen due to the crisis, and power cuts have been frequent.

Some car owners have simply abandoned their vehicles in front of petrol stations, with the military government threatening on Wednesday to impound them to ease traffic and reduce security risks.

A convoy of 300 fuel tankers reached Bamako on October 7, and another one with “dozens” of vehicles arrived on October 30, according to a government statement. Other attempts to truck in more fuel have met obstacles, however, as JNIM members ambush military-escorted convoys on highways and shoot at or kidnap soldiers and civilians.

Even as supplies in Bamako dry up, there are reports of JNIM setting fire to about 200 fuel tankers in southern and western Mali. Videos circulating on Malian social media channels show rows of oil tankers burning on a highway.

What is JNIM trying to achieve with this blockade?

Laessing of KAS said the group is probably hoping to leverage discontent with the government in the already troubled West African nation to put pressure on the military government to negotiate a power-sharing deal of sorts.

“They want to basically make people as angry as possible,” he said. “They could [be trying] to provoke protests which could bring down the current government and bring in a new one that’s more favourable towards them.”

Ochieng of Control Risks noted that, in its recent statements, JNIM has explicitly called for government change. While the previous civilian government of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (2013-2020) had negotiated with JNIM, the present government of Colonel Assimi Goita will likely keep up its military response, Ochieng said.

Frustration at the situation is growing in Bamako, with residents calling for the government to act.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, driver Omar Sidibe said the military leaders ought to find out the reasons for the shortage and act on them. “It’s up to the government to play a full role and take action [and] uncover the real reason for this shortage.”

Which parts of Mali is the JNIM active in?

In Mali, the group operates in rural areas of northern, central and western Mali, where there is a reduced government presence and high discontent with the authorities among local communities.

In the areas it controls, JNIM presents itself as an alternative to the government, which it calls “puppets of the West”, in order to recruit fighters from several ethnic minorities which have long held grievances over their perceived marginalisation by the government, including the Tuareg, Arab, Fulani, and Songhai groups. Researchers note the group also has some members from the majority Bambara group.

In central Mali, the group seized Lere town last November and captured the town of Farabougou in August this year. Both are small towns, but Farabougou is close to Wagadou Forest, a known hiding place of JNIM.

JNIM’s hold on major towns is weaker because of the stronger government presence in larger areas. It therefore more commonly blockades major towns or cities by destroying roads and bridges leading to them. Currently, the western cities of Nioro and gold-rich Kayes are cut off. The group is also besieging the major cities of Timbuktu and Gao, as well as Menaka and Boni towns, located in the north and northeast.

How is JNIM funded?

For revenue, the group oversees artisanal gold mines, forcefully taxes community members, smuggles weapons and kidnaps foreigners for ransom, according to the US DNI. Kayes region, whose capital, Kayes, is under siege, is a major gold hub, accounting for 80 percent of Mali’s gold production, according to conflict monitoring group Critical Threats.

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (Gi-Toc) also reports cattle rustling schemes, estimating that JNIM made 91,400 euros ($104,000) in livestock sales of cattle between 2017 and 2019. Cattle looted in Mali are sold cheaply in communities on the border with Ghana and the Ivory Coast, through a complex chain of intermediaries.

In which other countries is JNIM active?

JNIM expanded into Burkina Faso in 2017 by linking up with Burkina-Faso-based armed group Ansarul-Islam, which pledged allegiance to the Malian group. Ansarul-Islam was formed in 2016 by Ibrahim Dicko, who had close ties with Amadou Koufa, JNIM’s deputy head since 2017.

In Burkina Faso, JNIM uses similar tactics of recruiting from marginalised ethnic groups. The country has rapidly become a JNIM hotspot, with the group operating – or holding territory – in 11 of 13 Burkina Faso regions outside of capital Ouagadougou. There were 512 reported casualties as a result of JNIM violence in the country between January and April this year. It is not known how many have died as a result of violence by the armed group in total.

Since 2022, JNIM has laid siege to the major northern Burkinabe city of Djibo, with authorities forced to airlift in supplies. In a notable attack in May 2025, JNIM fighters overran a military base in the town, killing approximately 200 soldiers. It killed a further 60 in Solle, about 48km (30 miles) west of Djibo.

In October 2025, the group temporarily took control of Sabce town, also located in the north of Burkina Faso, killing 11 police officers in the process, according to the International Crisis Group.

In a September report, Human Rights Watch said JNIM and a second armed group – Islamic State Sahel, which is linked to ISIL (ISIS) – massacred civilians in Burkina Faso between May and September, including a civilian convoy trying to transport humanitarian aid into the besieged northern town of Gorom Gorom.

Meanwhile, JNIM is also moving southwards, towards other West African nations with access to the sea. It launched an offensive on Kafolo town, in northern Ivory Coast, in 2020.

JNIM members embedded in national parks on the border regions with Burkina Faso have been launching sporadic attacks in northern Togo and the Benin Republic since 2022.

In October this year, it recorded its first attack on the Benin-Nigeria border, where one Nigerian policeman was killed. The area is not well-policed because the two countries have no established military cooperation, analyst Ochieng said.

“This area is also quite a commercially viable region; there are mining and other developments taking place there … it is likely to be one that [JNIM] will try to establish a foothold,” she added.

Why are countries struggling to fend off JNIM?

When Mali leader General Assimi Goita led soldiers to seize power in a 2020 coup, military leaders promised to defeat the armed group, as well as a host of others that had been on the rise in the country. Military leaders subsequently seizing power from civilian governments in Burkina Faso (2022) and in Niger (2023) have made the same promises.

However, Mali and its neighbours have struggled to hold JNIM at bay, with ACLED data noting the number of JNIM attacks increasing notably since 2020.

In 2022, Mali’s military government ended cooperation with 4,000-strong French forces deployed in 2013 to battle armed groups which had emerged at the time, as well as separatist Tuaregs in the north. The last group of French forces exited the country in August 2022.

Mali also terminated contracts with a 10,000-man UN peacekeeping force stationed in the country in 2023.

Bamako is now working with Russian fighters – initially 1,500 from the Wagner Mercenary Group, but since June, from the Kremlin-controlled Africa Corps – estimated to be about 1,000 in number.

Russian officials are, to a lesser extent, also present in Burkina Faso and Niger, which have formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) with Mali.

Results in Mali have been mixed. Wagner supported the Malian military in seizing swaths of land in the northern Kidal region from Tuareg rebels.

But the Russians also suffered ambushes. In July 2024, a contingent of Wagner and Malian troops was ambushed by rebels in Tinzaouaten, close to the Algerian border. Between 20 and 80 Russians and 25 to 40 Malians were killed, according to varying reports. Researchers noted it was Wagner’s worst defeat since it had deployed to West Africa.

In all, Wagner did not record much success in targeting armed groups like JNIM, analyst Laessing told Al Jazeera.

Alongside Malian forces, the Russians have also been accused by rights groups of committing gross human rights violations against rural communities in northern Mali perceived to be supportive of armed groups.

Could the Russian Africa Corps fighters end the siege on Bamako?

Laessing said the fuel crisis is pressuring Mali to divert military resources and personnel to protect fuel tankers, keeping them from consolidating territory won back from armed groups and further endangering the country.

He added that the crisis will be a test for Russian Africa Corp fighters, who have not proven as ready as Wagner fighters to take battle risks. A video circulating on Russian social media purports to show Africa Corps members providing air support to fuel tanker convoys. It has not been verified by Al Jazeera.

“If they can come in and allow the fuel to flow into Bamako, then the Russians will be seen as heroes,” Laessing said – at least by locals.

Laessing added that the governments of Mali and Burkina Faso, in the medium to long term, might eventually have to negotiate with JNIM to find a way to end the crisis.

While Goita’s government has not attempted to hold talks with the group in the past, in early October, it greenlit talks led by local leaders, according to conflict monitoring group Critical Threats – although it is unclear exactly how the government gave its approval.

Agreements between the group and local leaders have reportedly already been signed in several towns across Segou, Mopti and Timbuktu regions, in which the group agrees to end its siege in return for the communities agreeing to JNIM rules, taxes, and noncooperation with the military.

Last year, Reliance Industries Ltd signed a deal with Russian major Rosneft to import nearly 500,000 barrels per day.

India’s top importer of Russian oil, the conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd, says it will abide by Western sanctions, ending several days of speculation about how the company will manage new measures targeting Russia’s two largest oil companies.

Reliance “will be adapting the refinery operations to meet the compliance requirements”, a company spokesperson said in a statement on Friday, while maintaining its relationships with suppliers.

“Whenever there is any guidance from the Indian Government in this respect, as always, we will be complying fully,” the statement added.

On Wednesday, the United States Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Russian majors Rosneft and Lukoil for the first time as President Donald Trump becomes increasingly frustrated with Russia’s unremitting war on Ukraine.

US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said the move was the result of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “refusal to end this senseless war” and encouraged allies to adhere to the new sanctions.

The following day, the European Union adopted its 19th package of measures against Russia, which includes a full transaction ban on Rosneft. The EU has previously said that, starting January 21, it will not receive fuel imports from refineries that received or processed Russian oil 60 days prior to shipping.

Reliance, chaired by billionaire businessman Mukesh Ambani, operates the world’s biggest refining complex in western Gujarat. The company has purchased roughly half of the 1.7-1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) of discounted Russian crude shipped to India, the news agency Press Trust of India reported this week.

In 2024, Reliance signed a 10-year deal with Rosneft to buy nearly 500,000 bpd, Reuters reported at the time. It also buys Russian oil from intermediaries.

Reliance did not offer details on how, exactly, it planned to navigate the sanctions – nor the fate of the 2024 Rosneft agreement – but emphasised it would comply with European import requirements.

“Reliance is confident its time-tested, diversified crude sourcing strategy will continue to ensure stability and reliability in its refinery operations for meeting the domestic and export requirements, including to Europe,” the company spokesperson said.

The sanctions also arrive as India navigates the fallout from Trump’s tariffs on Indian exports, which rose to 50 percent starting in August as a penalty for importing Russian oil. China and India are the world’s largest importers of Russian crude.

Trump has claimed multiple times over the past month that India has agreed to stop buying Russian oil as part of a broader trade deal, an assertion the Indian government has not confirmed.

Neither India’s Ministry of External Affairs nor oil ministries have responded since the sanctions were announced on Wednesday.

Washington has announced new sanctions against Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, in an effort to pressure Moscow to agree to a peace deal in Ukraine. This marks the first time the current Trump administration has imposed direct sanctions on Russia.

Speaking alongside Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump said he hoped the sanctions would not need to be in place for long, but expressed growing frustration with stalled truce negotiations.

“Every time I speak to Vladimir [Putin], I have good conversations and then they don’t go anywhere. They just don’t go anywhere,” Trump said, shortly after a planned in-person meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Budapest was cancelled.

Trump’s move is designed to cut off vital oil revenues, which help fund Russia’s ongoing war efforts. Earlier on Wednesday, Russia unleashed a new bombardment on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, killing at least seven people, including children.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the new sanctions were necessary because of “Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war”. He said that Rosneft and Lukoil fund the Kremlin’s “war machine”.

How have Rosneft and Lukoil been sanctioned?

The new measures will freeze assets owned by Rosneft and Lukoil in the US, and bar US entities from engaging in business with them. Thirty subsidiaries owned by Rosneft and Lukoil have also been sanctioned.

Rosneft, which is controlled by the Kremlin, is Russia’s second-largest company in terms of revenue, behind natural gas giant Gazprom. Lukoil is Russia’s third-largest company and its biggest non-state enterprise.

Between them, the two groups export 3.1 million barrels of oil per day, or 70 percent of Russia’s overseas crude oil sales. Rosneft alone is responsible for nearly half of Russia’s oil production, which in all makes up 6 percent of global output.

In recent years, both companies have been hit by rolling European sanctions and reduced oil prices. In September, Rosneft reported a 68 percent year-on-year drop in net income for the first half of 2025. Lukoil posted an almost 27 percent fall in profits for 2024.

Meanwhile, last week, the United Kingdom unveiled sanctions on the two oil majors. Elsewhere, the European Union looks set to announce its 19th package of penalties on Moscow later today, including a ban on imports of Russian liquefied natural gas.

How much impact will these sanctions have?

In 2022, Russian oil groups (including Rosneft and Lukoil) were able to offset some of the effects of sanctions by pivoting exports from Europe to Asia, and also using a “shadow fleet” of hard-to-detect tankers with no ties to Western financial or insurance groups.

China and India quickly replaced the EU as Russia’s biggest oil consumers. Last year, China imported a record 109 million tonnes of Russian crude, representing almost 20 percent of its total energy imports. India imported 88 million tonnes of Russian oil in 2024.

In both cases, these are orders of magnitude higher than before 2022, when Western countries started to tighten their sanctions regime on Russia. At the end of 2021, China imported roughly 79.6 million tonnes of Russian crude. India imported just 0.42 million tonnes.

Trump has repeatedly urged Beijing and New Delhi to halt Russian energy purchases. In August, he levied an additional 25 percent trade tariff on India because of its continued purchase of discounted Russian oil. He has so far demurred from a similar move against China.

However, Trump’s new sanctions are likely to place pressure on foreign financial groups which do business with Rosneft and Lukoil, including the banking intermediaries which facilitate sales of Russian oil in China and India.

“Engaging in certain transactions involving the persons designated today may risk the imposition of secondary sanctions on participating foreign financial institutions,” the US Treasury Department’s press release on Wednesday’s sanctions says.

As a result, the new restrictions may force buyers to shift to alternative suppliers or pay higher prices. Though India and China may not be the direct targets of these latest restrictions, their oil supply chains and trading costs are likely to come under increased pressure.

“The big thing here is the secondary sanctions,” Felipe Pohlmann Gonzaga, a Switzerland-based commodity trader, told Al Jazeera. “Any bank that facilitates Russian oil sales and with exposure to the US financial system could be subject.”

However, he added, “I don’t think this will be the driver in ending the war, as Russia will continue selling oil. There are always people out there willing to take the risk to beat sanctions.

“These latest restrictions will make Chinese and Indian players more reluctant to buy Russian oil – many won’t want to lose access to the American financial system. [But] it won’t stop it completely.”

According to Bloomberg, several senior refinery executives in India – who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue – said the restrictions would make it impossible for oil purchases to continue.

On Wednesday, Trump said that he would raise concerns about China’s continued purchases of Russian oil during his talk with President Xi Jinping at the 2025 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea next week.

Have oil prices been affected?

Oil prices rallied after Trump announced US sanctions. Brent – the international crude oil benchmark – rose nearly 4 percent to $65 a barrel on Thursday. The US Benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, jumped more than 5 percent to nearly $60 per barrel.

Pohlmann Gonzaga, however, predicted that the “market will correct from this 5 percent over-jump. You have to recall that sentiment in energy markets is still negative due to the gloomy [global] economic backdrop.”

Here are the key events from day 1,322 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Here is how things stand on Wednesday, October 8, 2025:

Fighting

• Russian President Vladimir Putin said his forces have captured almost 5,000 square kilometres (1,930sq miles) of Ukrainian territory so far this year, and Moscow retains the strategic initiative on the battlefield.
• Russian troops have captured the Ukrainian villages of Novovasylivka in the southeastern Zaporizhia region and Fedorivka in the eastern Donetsk region, Russia’s defence ministry said.
• Russian air defence units destroyed 184 Ukrainian drones in recent attacks, the RIA Novosti state-owned news agency reports.
• Russia’s air defence units also intercepted and destroyed a drone flying towards Moscow city, said Sergei Sobyanin, mayor of the Russian capital.

• Ukraine’s Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk said Russian air strikes have caused “significant” damage to Ukrainian gas production capacity due to the targeting of regional gas infrastructure and power transmission facilities in front-line regions.
• Hrynchuk said Ukraine wants to increase imports of natural gas by 30 percent after Russian attacks on its gas infrastructure, telling reporters she had discussed additional gas imports with Group of Seven (G7) member states.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of using oil tankers for intelligence gathering and sabotage operations, and he added that Ukraine was cooperating with its allies on the matter.
• Russia’s state nuclear energy company has claimed that a Ukrainian drone attempted to strike a nuclear plant in Russia’s Voronezh region bordering Ukraine, but the unmanned aerial vehicle crashed into a cooling tower and caused no damage at the site.

Military aid

• Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia was waiting for clarity from the United States about the possible supply of Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, saying such weapons could theoretically carry nuclear warheads and reiterated that Moscow would see the provision of such weapons as a serious escalation.
• The Kremlin also said it assumed for now that US President Donald Trump still sought a peace settlement in Ukraine.

Peace talks

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke by phone with President Putin and said diplomatic initiatives need to gain momentum to achieve a just and lasting peace in the Russia-Ukraine war, Erdogan’s office said.
• The statement cited Erdogan as saying Turkiye will continue to work for peace and said bilateral relations and regional and global issues were also discussed with Putin.
• Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she believed Trump had come to the conclusion that Russia was not interested in a peace deal with Ukraine, and that the only way forward was to apply pressure, continue to support Ukraine, and impose sanctions on Russia.

Politics and diplomacy

• Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said it is not in Poland’s interest to hand over a Ukrainian man wanted by Germany for suspected involvement in explosions which damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines three years ago.
• Tusk said the problem with Nord Stream 2 was not that it was blown up but that it was built. He added that Russia built the pipelines “against the vital interests not only of our countries, but of all of Europe”.
• A Polish court ruled on Monday that the Ukrainian diver wanted by Germany over his alleged involvement in the explosions, which damaged the Nord Stream gas pipeline, must remain in custody for another 40 days, his lawyer said.
• European Union governments have agreed to impose limits on the travel of Russian diplomats within the bloc, the Financial Times reported.

Economy

• Ukraine’s foreign currency reserves totalled $46.5bn as of October 1, the National Bank of Ukraine reported on its website.

Control over lucrative exports was a major point of contention between Baghdad and Kurdistan region, with a key pipeline to Turkiye shut since 2023.

Iraq has resumed crude oil exports from the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region to Turkiye after an interim deal broke a two-and-a-half-year deadlock over legal and technical disputes.

The resumption started at 6am local time (03:00 GMT), according to a statement from Iraq’s oil ministry on Saturday. “Operations started at a rapid pace and with complete smoothness without recording any significant technical problems,” the ministry said.

Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar also confirmed the development in a post on X.

The agreement between Iraq’s federal government, the Kurdistan regional government (KRG) and foreign oil producers operating in the region will allow 180,000 to 190,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude to flow to Turkiye’s Ceyhan port, Iraq’s oil minister told Kurdish broadcaster Rudaw on Friday.

The resumption follows a tripartite agreement reached earlier this week between the ministry, the Kurdish region’s natural resources ministry, and international oil companies operating in the region.

The United States had pushed for a restart, which is expected to eventually bring up to 230,000 bpd of crude back to international markets at a time when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is boosting output to gain market share. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomed the deal in a statement, saying it “will bring tangible benefits for both Americans and Iraqis”.

Iraq’s OPEC delegate, Mohammed al-Najjar, said his country can export more than it is now after the resumption of flows via the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline, in addition to other planned projects at Basra port, state news agency INA reported on Saturday.

“OPEC member states have the right to demand an increase in their [production] shares especially if they have projects that led to an increase in production capacity,” he said.

Companies operating in the Kurdistan region will receive $16 per barrel to cover production and transportation costs. The eight oil companies that signed the deal and the Kurdish authorities have agreed to meet within 30 days of exports resuming to work on a mechanism for settling the outstanding debt of $1bn the Kurdistan region owes to the firms.

Control over lucrative oil exports has been a major point of contention between Baghdad and Erbil, with the deal seen as a step towards boosting Iraq’s oil revenues and stabilising the relationship between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish region.

Oil exports were previously independently sold by the Kurdish authorities, without the approval or oversight of the federal authorities in Baghdad, through the port of Ceyhan in Turkiye.

The Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline was halted in March 2023 when the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris ordered Turkiye to pay Iraq $1.5bn in damages for unauthorised exports by the Kurdish regional authorities.

The Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan, which represents international oil firms operating in the region, put losses to Iraq since the pipeline closed at more than $35bn.

Istanbul, Turkiye – Just hours after Israel launched strikes last week against Qatar – a United States-designated “major non-NATO ally” and one of Washington’s closest Gulf partners – pro-Israel commentators quickly shifted their attention to Turkiye.

In Washington, Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, suggested that Turkiye could be Israel’s next target and warned that it should not rely on its NATO membership for protection.

On social media, Israeli academic and political figure Meir Masri posted, “Today Qatar, tomorrow Turkey.” Ankara responded sharply. In unusually harsh language, a senior adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wrote: “To the dog of Zionist Israel … soon the world will find peace with your erasure from the map.”

For months, pro-Israel media outlets have steadily escalated their rhetoric against Turkiye, portraying it as “Israel’s most dangerous enemy”.

Israeli commentators have also framed Turkiye’s presence in the eastern Mediterranean as a “threat” and its role in rebuilding post-war Syria as a “new rising danger”.

With Israel’s regional aggression escalating and its war on Gaza showing no sign of ending, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan retaliated in August by suspending economic and trade ties with Israel.

“In Ankara, this [anti-Turkish] rhetoric is taken seriously, with Israel seen as seeking regional hegemony,” Omer Ozkizilcik, non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Al Jazeera.

“Turkiye increasingly feels that Israeli aggression has no limits and enjoys American support,” added Ozkizilcik.

The strikes on Qatar also likely underscored Ankara’s doubts about US security guarantees as a NATO ally. Despite Doha’s special ally status with Washington, Israel faced no visible pushback from the US, leading to questions over whether the US would truly see any attack on Turkiye as an attack on itself, as the NATO charter dictates.

Unlike many Arab states, however, “Turkiye has long ago understood that it cannot rely on the US or NATO for its own national security interests,” said Ozkizilcik.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself now increasingly boasts of his country’s regional expansionist goals. In August, when asked whether he believed in the idea of a “Greater Israel”, he replied: “Absolutely.”

For Ankara, such rhetoric is not just symbolic – it signals an Israeli vision of dominance that stretches across the Middle East, potentially clashing head-on with Turkiye’s own regional outlook.

On Sunday, Fidan told Al Jazeera that Israel’s “Greater Israel” vision – which some religious Zionists believe extends into modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan – aims to “keep the countries in the region weak, ineffective, and especially to leave Israel’s neighbouring states divided”.

Over the last few weeks alone, Israel – in addition to continuing its genocidal onslaught in Gaza and nearly-daily raids in the occupied West Bank – also attacked Yemen and Syria, and is accused of hitting the Gaza aid flotilla in Tunisia.

Against this backdrop, Turkiye and Israel are already in a “geopolitical rivalry”, noted Ozkizilcik, adding that Israel’s actions clashed with what the analyst views as the “Turkish agenda to have strong [centralised] states” rather than decentralised states where multiple forces can hold power.

Regional hegemon

The sense that Israel is trying to become the region’s sole dominant power seemed to be confirmed in July when Tom Barrack, US ambassador to Turkiye and special envoy to Syria, made a startling admission: that Israel would prefer a fragmented and divided Syria.

“Strong nation-states are a threat – especially Arab states, [which] are viewed as a threat to Israel,” he said.

The subtext for Ankara was clear: Israel believes it needs to be the hegemon in the region to feel secure.

Israel’s actions bear this out. It has bombed Syria dozens of times since December 8 – when former President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow – and grabbed Syrian territory in the immediate chaos.

It decapitated much of Hezbollah’s leadership in 2024 and still occupies parts of Lebanon despite a ceasefire, long seeking to weaken or destroy the group.

In June, Israel attacked Iran, sparking a 12-day war that struck Iranian military and nuclear facilities, killing senior commanders and nuclear scientists, and dragged in the US.

The attacks aimed not only to weaken Tehran’s defence and nuclear capabilities but also to push Washington towards regime change, targeting one of Israel’s strongest rivals in the region.

Israel may now view Turkiye as the next potential challenge to its regional hegemony, explaining its adamant stance that Ankara will not be allowed to establish new bases in Syria that “could threaten Israel” – as Netanyahu has previously said.

“The first manifestation of Turkish-Israeli friction will most likely appear in the Syrian front in the land and air,” warns Cem Gurdeniz, a retired Turkish admiral and architect of the Blue Homeland doctrine, a maritime strategy that calls for Turkiye to assert its sovereignty and safeguard its interests across the surrounding seas – the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea.

“In parallel, Israel’s deepening military and intelligence footprint in Cyprus, tightly woven with Greece and the Greek Cypriot administration under American auspices, is perceived in Ankara as a deliberate attempt to fracture and contain the Blue Homeland,” Gurdeniz told Al Jazeera.

“To Ankara, this is not a defensive posture by Israel but an offensive encirclement strategy that could threaten both Turkish maritime freedom and the security of the Turkish Cypriot people,” he added, referring to Turkiye’s ties to the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is only Turkiye recognises, rather than the rest of Cyprus, which is ruled by Greek Cypriots.

The division of Cyprus is a major source of discontent between Turkiye, Greece and Cyprus.

Reports that Cyprus received Israeli air-defence systems last week are likely to raise alarm in Ankara.

In tandem in Syria, Israel has made no secret that what it considers to be a stable Syria “can only be a federal” one with “different autonomies”, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told European leaders at a meeting in Brussels in February.

Turkiye, on the other hand, backs the new Syrian administration, which insists on a centralised and unitary state.

For now, tensions between Israel and Turkiye can be described as “controlled”, says Gokhan Cinkara, director of Necmettin Erbakan University’s Global and Regional Studies Centre in Turkiye.

“At present, the riskiest scenario for Turkiye would be an uncontrolled outbreak of intergroup conflict in Syria. For this reason, Ankara is likely advising the new Syrian administration to act with a degree of rational pragmatism,” Cinkara told Al Jazeera.

“The immaturity of Syria’s security apparatus makes any potential intergroup clashes harder to contain, and risks turning it into protracted ethnic and sectarian conflicts. In the short term, therefore, adopting a unitary model seems difficult,” he added.

Red lines and risks

Netanyahu, for his part, is pushing for a “Balkanised” Syria, divided along ethnic and religious lines, demanding the demilitarisation of much of southern Syria, mostly populated by the country’s Druze population.

That is a move that, if implemented, could light the touchpaper and ignite demands from members of other groups in the country, including the Kurds and Alawite, for their own tailored versions of de facto autonomy.

“Turkiye, however, has clear red lines in Syria,” says Murat Yesiltas, director of foreign policy research at SETA, a think tank in Ankara with close ties to the government.

“The US and Israel’s attempt to reshape the regional order carries various dangers and risks, deepening fragmentation in the Middle East,” Yesiltas told Al Jazeera.

In March, Israel’s most influential security think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), published a piece that warned against the nascent peace process between Turkiye and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is seeking to close a chapter on a four-decade armed campaign against the Turkish state in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people.

The INSS warned that this could “weaken the ability of the Kurds in Syria to continue to operate autonomously” and contribute to Ankara “expanding its influence in southern Syria, in a way that could increase the threat to Israeli freedom of action”.

Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz made clear that swaths of newly occupied territory in southern Syria will be held for an “unlimited amount of time”.

As Turkiye scoped out potential military bases in Syria’s Homs province and the main airport in Hama province in coordination with the newly established Damascus government, Israel bombed the sites.

“If Tel Aviv persists on this path, a conflict between Ankara and Tel Aviv will become inevitable. Turkiye cannot accept policies that perpetuate instability on its southern border,” said Yesiltas.

But full-blown rivalry is “not inevitable” as both sides recognise the costs of confrontation, particularly given economic interdependence, Andreas Krieg, associate professor of security studies at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera.

“Israel’s threat to Turkiye is not conventional military aggression but rather the targeting of Turkish interests via indirect means,” said Krieg, speaking about Ankara’s interests in Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean and the South Caucasus.

Given Washington’s full and seemingly unconditional support for Netanyahu’s bid to “reshape the region”, Krieg says Ankara’s prescription is to “strengthen strategic deterrence, especially through expanded air-defence, missile systems and intelligence capabilities” and to pursue regional coalitions with Qatar, Jordan and Iraq while maintaining open channels with Washington to “avoid full strategic isolation”.

“Ankara must recognise that future flashpoints are more likely to emerge in the grey zone – covert operations, air strikes, and proxy competition – than in formal declarations or diplomacy,” he added.

Ukraine has worsened fuel shortages across Russia in the past week as it has continued to hit Russia’s refineries and energy infrastructure with long-range drones while Poland has called for more oil sanctions in the wake of Russia’s first drone attack on NATO soil.

In the meantime, Russia’s creeping advance resulted in the capture of three villages over the past week, and perhaps for the first time, Ukraine’s command reacted by dismissing the retreating officers.

Russian forces took the villages of Sosnovka and Novonikolayevka in Dnipropetrovsk and Olhivske/Olgovskoye in Zaporizhia.

Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii on Monday fired the two officers in charge of the 17th and 20th army corps, which are based in the two respective regions.

Since 2024, Ukraine has fought through slow, tactical retreats designed to cede limited ground for disproportionately high Russian casualties.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, has estimated that in May, June, July and August, Russia took 1,910sq km (737.5sq miles) of Ukrainian territory at a cost of 130,000 casualties, averaging 68 casualties per square kilometre.

Syrskyi’s dismissals could indicate a tougher approach towards land losses going forward.

Russian forces were suffering “significant losses” in Kupiansk and Dobropillia, two of the hottest points along the front, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday.

Ukrainian defenders were advancing towards the Russian border in Sumy in northern Ukraine, he said.

Ukraine’s strategy – not purely defensive

Ukraine has launched a two-pronged strategy this year to choke off fuel supplies to the Russian economy and military and to kill Russian revenues from energy exports.

“The most effective sanctions – the ones that work the fastest – are the fires at Russia’s oil refineries, its terminals, oil depots,” Zelenskyy said in an evening address to the Ukrainian people on Sunday.

“Russia’s war is essentially a function of oil, of gas, of all its other energy resources,” he said.

That day, Ukraine crippled Russia’s second largest refinery when its drones struck a processing unit accounting for 40 percent of the plant’s capacity.

Russian authorities said they shot down 361 drones, suggesting there were many other targets as well.

Industry sources told the Reuters news agency that the Kirishinefteorgsintez refinery, located in the northwestern town of Kirishi, would boost production at other units. Even so, the refinery could operate only at three-quarters of its capacity.

Last year, it produced 7.1 million tonnes of diesel and 6.1 million tonnes of fuel oil for ships.

Two days after the Kirishi strike, Ukraine’s military reported it also struck the Saratov refinery, which supplies the Russian military.

There is mounting evidence that the first prong of Ukraine’s strategy is working.

Russian state newspaper Izvestiya reported last week that fuel shortages had spread to 10 Russian republics and regions, including the central regions of Ryazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov and Rostov as well as occupied Crimea.

Izvestiya’s report was based on interviews with the Russian Independent Fuel Union, an association of petrol station owners, which said many petrol stations had not received deliveries for several weeks and had been forced to shut down.

Regional governors have also recently confirmed fuel shortages.

Ukraine has struck at least 10 major Russian refineries this year, and the commander of its Unmanned Systems Forces estimated Russia has lost one-fifth of its refining capacity.

“The Russian war machine will only stop when it runs out of fuel,” Zelenskyy told the annual Yalta European Strategy Meeting in Kyiv on Friday. “And Putin will begin to stop it himself when he himself truly feels that the resources for war are running out.”

Fewer exports

The second prong of Ukraine’s strategy, choking off Russia’s cashflow from oil and fuel exports, has also been highly successful.

On Friday, Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s largest oil offloading terminal at Primorsk on the Baltic Sea, according to sources at Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU).

The strike caused a fire at the pumping station and a ship moored next to it, forcing the terminal to suspend shipments, Ukrainian outlet Suspilne reported.

Ukraine also struck pumping stations along the Transneft Baltic Pipeline System-2, which supplies crude oil to offloading terminals in the port of Ust-Luga, also in the Leningrad region.

“Oil and gas revenues have accounted for between a third and half of Russia’s total federal budget proceeds over the past decade, making the sector the single most important source of financing for the government,” Reuters said.

Russia has banned all exports of refined petroleum products since February and sought to increase exports of crude oil instead.

But even that goal may not be possible.

Russia’s biggest pipeline operator, Transneft, has reportedly told upstream oil producers they may have to cut their output because Ukrainian strikes have degraded its ability to store and carry oil to refineries and export terminals, according to three industry sources who spoke to Reuters.

Transneft dismissed the report as “fake news”.

EU seeks to end all imports

Poland called for a complete ban of Russian oil imports to the European Union after 19 Russian drones entered its airspace on September 10.

Most of the EU has banned Russian oil imports, but Hungary and Slovakia have an exemption until the end of 2027 because they said it’s cheaper for them to import oil via pipeline from Russia than to receive it through other EU countries.

That may change, the European Commission chief said on Tuesday. “The Commission will soon present its 19th package of sanctions, targeting crypto, banks, and energy,” President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on social media. “The Commission will propose speeding up the phase-out of Russian fossil imports.”

Ongoing sales of Russian energy to Europe have been a topic of concern.

Official EU imports of Russian oil have dropped by an estimated 90 percent since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to estimates from the EU’s statistical service.

However, the EU never actually banned Russian gas, and the London-based think tank Ember has estimated it paid Russia $23.6bn for gas last year – almost $5bn more than it paid in military aid to Ukraine.

“I urge all partners to stop looking for excuses not to impose particular sanctions,” Zelenskyy said on Saturday. “If [Russian President Vladimir] Putin does not want peace, he must be forced into it.”

United States President Donald Trump has said he is ready to sanction Russia, but only if all NATO allies agree to completely halt buying oil from Moscow and impose their own sanctions on Russia to pressure it to end its more than three-year war in Ukraine.

“I am ready to do major Sanctions on Russia when all NATO Nations have agreed, and started, to do the same thing, and when all NATO Nations STOP BUYING OIL FROM RUSSIA,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform on Saturday, which he described as a letter to all NATO nations and the world.

Trump proposed that NATO, as a group, place 50-100 percent tariffs on China to weaken its economic grip over Russia.

Trump also wrote that NATO’s commitment “to WIN” the war “has been far less than 100%” and that it was “shocking” that some members of the alliance continued to buy Russian oil. As if speaking to them, he said, “It greatly weakens your negotiating position, and bargaining power, over Russia.”

NATO member Turkiye has been the third-largest buyer of Russian oil, after China and India. Other members of the 32-state alliance involved in buying Russian oil include Hungary and Slovakia, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

If NATO “does as I say, the WAR will end quickly”, Trump wrote. “If not, you are just wasting my time.”

As he struggles to deliver on promises to end the war quickly, Trump has repeatedly threatened to increase pressure on Russia. Last month, he slapped a 50 percent tariff on India over its continued buying of Russian oil, though he has not yet taken similar actions against China.

Trump’s social media post comes days after Polish and NATO forces shot down drones violating Polish airspace during Russia’s biggest-ever aerial barrage against Ukraine.

Poland and Romania scramble aircraft

Polish airspace has been violated many times since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but never on this scale anywhere in NATO territory.

Wednesday’s incident was the first time a NATO member is known to have fired shots during Russia’s war in Ukraine.

On Saturday, Poland said it and its NATO allies had deployed helicopters and aircraft as Russian drones struck Ukraine, not far from its border.

Poland’s military command said on X that “ground-based air defence and radar reconnaissance systems have reached their highest level of alert”, adding that the actions were “preventative”.

Also on Saturday, Romania’s Ministry of National Defence said that the country’s airspace had been breached by a drone during a Russian attack on infrastructure in neighbouring Ukraine.

The country scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to monitor the situation, tracking the drone until it disappeared from the radar” near the Romanian village of Chilia Veche, said the ministry in a statement.

Little sign of peace

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has welcomed the prospect of penalties on states still doing business with Moscow.

In an interview with the US media outlet ABC News last week, Zelenskyy said, “I’m very thankful to all the partners, but some of them, I mean, they continue [to] buy oil and Russian gas, and this is not fair… I think the idea to put tariffs on the countries that continue to make deals with Russia, I think this is the right idea.”

Last month, the US president hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, to discuss an end to the war, in their first face-to-face meeting since Trump’s return to the White House.

Shortly afterwards, he hosted Zelenskyy and European leaders in Washington, DC, for discussions on a settlement.

Despite the diplomatic blitz, there has been little progress towards a peace deal, with Moscow and Kyiv remaining far apart on key issues and Russia persisting in its bombardment of Ukrainian cities.

Russia claims advances

Russia on Saturday said it had captured a new village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, which Moscow’s forces say they reached at the beginning of July.

The Russian Ministry of Defence said its troops had seized the village of Novomykolaivka near the border with the Donetsk region – the epicentre of fighting on the front. The AFP news agency was unable to confirm this claim.

DeepState, an online battlefield map run by Ukrainian military analysts, said the village was still under Kyiv’s control.

At the end of August, Ukraine had for the first time acknowledged that Russian soldiers had entered the Dnipropetrovsk region, where Moscow had claimed advances at the start of the month.

The Russian army currently controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory.

The Kremlin is demanding that Ukraine withdraw from its eastern Donbas region, comprised of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as a condition for halting hostilities, something that Kyiv has rejected.

The Dnipropetrovsk region is not one of the five Ukrainian regions – Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Crimea – that Moscow has publicly claimed as Russian territory.

On Friday, Zelenskyy said that Putin wanted to “occupy all of Ukraine” and would not stop until his goal was achieved, even if Kyiv agreed to cede territory.

United States President Donald Trump has threatened to slap new sanctions on Russia and secondary sanctions on countries that buy Moscow’s crude in efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

While Trump imposed an additional 25 percent tariff earlier this month – to a total of 50 percent – on India’s goods, citing its continued imports of Russian oil, he has not instigated similar punitive actions against China, the largest buyer of Russian energy.

So, why has the Trump administration mounted pressure on India to stop purchasing Russian oil while taking little action against China?

Who is buying Russia oil, and how does Trump want to prevent that?

As the largest purchaser of Russian oil, China imported a record 109 million tonnes of this product last year, representing nearly 20 percent of its total energy imports, Chinese customs data showed.

India, by contrast, imported 88 million tonnes of Russian oil in 2024.

As such, China has arguably been Russia’s key economic lifeline, leading to accusations that Beijing is indirectly helping Moscow in its war on Ukraine, now in its fourth year.

It is understood that lawmakers from both main US political parties are pushing for a bill – the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 – that would target any country that buys Russian oil and natural gas.

The bill would give Trump the authority to impose 500 percent tariffs against nations that are perceived to be helping Russia. US senators are reportedly waiting on Trump’s OK to move the bill forward.

What reasons has Trump cited for not imposing new tariffs on China?

Asked by Fox News on August 15 if he was considering secondary sanctions on Beijing after he and Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to agree on a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in Alaska last week, Trump said, “Well, because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about that.”

“Now, I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now,” he said.

Observers suspect Trump is buying time to allow negotiations on a broad trade deal that would include rare earth minerals.

Rare earths are a group of 17 elements essential to numerous manufacturing industries, from auto parts to clean energy and military technology. China has long dominated the mining and processing of rare earth minerals.

Because numerous US industries are heavily reliant on Chinese minerals, they remain a central issue in ongoing trade talks.

Trump has other reasons for giving China an easier ride than India. In particular, he’s keen to avoid a tariff spike just as US retailers stock up on inventories of Chinese goods ahead of December’s Christmas holiday season.

For his part, Trump has taken steps to reduce trade flashpoints in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the US eased some of its export restrictions on advanced semiconductors – a key demand from China.

On August 11, Trump permitted US company Nvidia to sell advanced chips to China – even if the tech giant would have to pay 15 percent of its China sales to the federal government. Trump had previously barred the deal.

Speaking to CNBC news on Tuesday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended Washington’s decision not to impose secondary sanctions against China saying, Beijing purchased 13 percent of Russian oil before the Ukraine war, which has now increased to 16 percent. “So China has a diversified input of their oil,” he said.

He added that China had not engaged in the kind of “arbitrage” done by India.

But Bessent accused India of “profiteering”. He pointed out that before the Ukraine war, India’s import of Russian oil was less than 1 percent. But “now, I believe, it’s up to 42 percent,” he said. “This is what I would call the Indian arbitrage – buying cheap Russian oil, reselling it as product,” he told CNBC.

“They’ve made $16bn in excess profits – some of the richest families in India.”

On Monday, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro became the second senior Trump administration official to accuse India of financing Russia’s war in Ukraine. Earlier this month, Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff at the White House, said that New Delhi’s purchase of Russia crude was “not acceptable”.

What have other officials said?

On August 12, US Vice President JD Vance declined to say whether Trump would move against Beijing as he did with New Delhi the previous week, when Washington announced an extra 25 percent tariff on India’s imports over its continued purchase of Russian oil.

“The president said he’s thinking about it, but he hasn’t made any firm decisions … the China issue’s a little bit more complicated because our relationship with China, it just, it affects a lot of other things that have nothing to do with the Russian situation,” Vance said.

Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that energy prices could rise if the US imposes secondary sanctions on China for refining Russian oil.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Rubio said, “If you put secondary sanctions on a country – let’s say you were to go after the oil sales of Russian oil to China. Well, China just refines that oil. That oil is then sold into the global marketplace, and anyone who’s buying that oil would be paying more for it.”

Meanwhile, Beijing’s embassy in Washington said China’s trade with Russia falls within the scope of international law.

“The international community, including China, has conducted normal cooperation with Russia within the framework of international law,” said Liu Pengyu, the embassy’s spokesman, on July 6.

How would heightened tariffs impact the US and Chinese economies?

A ceasefire deal in Ukraine, with the resulting reduction of sanctions on Russia, would bring greater stability to the international system and a boon for China’s economy, not least after the last subdued economic data in July.

Last month, China’s economy slowed as factory activity, investment and retail sales fell from June, suggesting that spillovers from Trump’s tariffs are casting a pall over the world’s number-two economy.

Elsewhere, China’s youth unemployment rate rose to its highest level in 11 months in July, as the urban jobless rate for the 16-24 age group, excluding students, rose to 17.8 percent – up from 14.5 percent in June.

Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief Asia Pacific economist at Natixis in Hong Kong, told Al Jazeera that “Cracks are starting to show [in the Chinese economy] and the overall picture is not great.”

Still, she said that “Chinese banks and firms have been preparing for the possibility of secondary sanctions for a long time already. They already started worrying about this under the [Joe] Biden administration.”

In recent years, Beijing has stepped up its efforts to diversify trade routes and build greater numbers of strategic products at home, making China’s economy “harder to strangle through elevated or secondary sanctions”, said Garcia Herrero.

“Clearly,” she said, “given the high level of goods imports from China to the US, higher tariffs would also raise inflation for American consumers.”

Last year, the US trade deficit with China was $295.4bn, marking a 5.8 percent rise from 2023.

What is the current state of US-China trade?

On August 12, the US and China extended a pre-existing tariff pause – and avoided an all-out trade war – for 90 days. With the extension, the imposition of higher US tariffs on China was suspended until November 10, with all other elements of the truce remaining in place.

The two sides agreed to their first tariff pause on May 11.

In April, China was slapped with a tariff of 145 percent while Beijing slapped a reciprocal tariff of 125 percent on the US – rates that amounted to a virtual trade embargo between the countries.

High tariffs prompted the US trade deficit with China to fall to its narrowest level since 2004 in June, according to US Census Bureau data. The US trade gap with China fell by $22.2bn from March to August. That amounts to a 70 percent drop from one year earlier.

But the tariff truce agreed to in May in Geneva, Switzerland, lowered the temperature by temporarily slashing US tariffs on Chinese imports to 30 percent, while Chinese levies on US exports fell to 10 percent. Beijing also agreed to resume some rare earth exports.

“I think there will be a [trade] deal of some sort soon,” Garcia Herrero said. “Nothing dramatic, as the levels of trust on both sides are low. But the US and China both need some positive news, or they face hitting economic walls.”

United States President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine.

On Wednesday, following a virtual meeting with European leaders including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump warned of “severe consequences” if Putin refuses to accept a ceasefire after more than three years of war.

The venue for the high-profile meeting is Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a US military installation on the northern edge of Alaska’s most populous city.

Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson is Alaska’s largest military base. The 64,000-acre outfit is a key US site for Arctic military drills and readiness.

When Trump visited the base during his first term, in 2019, he said the troops there “serve in our country’s last frontier as America’s first line of defence”.

But that wasn’t always the case. Indeed, the US government actually bought Alaska from Russia – separated by just 90km (55 miles) at the narrowest point of the Bering Strait – in 1867.

At a news briefing on August 9, Russian presidential assistant Yuri Ushakov pointed out that the two countries are neighbours.

“It seems quite logical for our delegation simply to fly over the Bering Strait and for such an important … summit of the leaders of the two countries to be held in Alaska,” Ushakov said.

When did Russia assume control of Alaska?

When Russian Tsar Peter the Great dispatched the Danish navigator Vitus Bering in 1725 to explore the Alaskan coast, Russia already had a high interest in the region, which was rich in natural resources – including lucrative sea otter pelts – and sparsely populated.

Then, in 1799, Emperor Paul I granted the “Russian-American Company” a monopoly over governance in Alaska. This state-sponsored group established settlements like Sitka, which became the colonial capital after Russia ruthlessly overcame the native Tlingit tribe in 1804.

Russia’s Alaskan ambitions, however, quickly faced numerous challenges – the vast distance from then-capital St Petersburg, harsh climates, supply shortages, and growing competition from American explorers.

As the US expanded westward in the early 1800s, Americans soon found themselves toe to toe with Russian traders. What’s more, Russia lacked the resources to support major settlements and a military presence along the Pacific coast.

The history of the region then changed dramatically in the mid-19th century.

Why did Russia sell Alaska after the Crimean War?

The Crimean War (1853-1856) started when Russia invaded the Turkish Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, modern-day Romania. Wary of Russian expansion into their trade routes, Britain and France allied with the ailing Ottoman Empire.

The war’s main theatre of battle became the Crimean Peninsula, as British and French forces targeted Russian positions in the Black Sea, which connects to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits – previously controlled by the Ottoman Empire.

After three years, Russia humiliatingly lost the war, forcing it to reassess its colonial priorities. According to calculations by Advocate for Peace, a journal published by the American Peace Society in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Russia spent the equivalent of 160 million pounds sterling on the war.

Meanwhile, due to overhunting, Alaska yielded little profit by the mid-1800s. Its proximity to British-controlled Canada also made it a liability in any future Anglo-Russian conflict.

By the early 1860s, Tsar Alexander II concluded that selling Alaska would both raise funds Russia desperately needed and prevent Britain from seizing it in a future war. The US, which had continued to expand across the continent, emerged as a willing buyer, leading to the 1867 Alaska Purchase.

How was the sale received in the US?

After the American Civil War ended in 1865, Secretary of State William Seward took up Russia’s longstanding offer to buy Alaska. On March 30, 1867, Washington agreed to buy Alaska from Russia for $7.2m.

For less than 2 cents an acre (4 metres), the US acquired nearly 1.5 million sq km (600,000 square miles) of land and ensured access to the Pacific northern rim. But opponents of the Alaska Purchase, who saw little value in the vast ice sheet, persisted in calling it “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’s Icebox”.

“We simply obtain by the treaty the nominal possession of impassable deserts of snow, vast tracts of dwarf timbers… we get… Sitka and the Prince of Wales Islands. All the rest is waste territory,” wrote the New York Daily Tribune in April 1867.

But in 1896, the Klondike Gold Strike convinced even the harshest critics that Alaska was a valuable addition to US territory. Over time, the strategic importance of Alaska was gradually recognised, and in January 1959 Alaska finally became a US state.

What’s its economy like now?

By the early 20th century, Alaska’s economy began to diversify away from gold. Commercial fishing, especially for salmon and halibut, became a major industry, while copper mining boomed in places like Kennecott.

Then, during World War II, the construction of military bases brought infrastructure improvements and population growth. The most transformative moment, however, came in 1968 with the discovery of vast oil reserves at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast.

Oil revenues became the cornerstone of Alaska’s economy, funding public services as well as the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays annual dividends – via returns on stocks, bonds, real estate, and other assets – to residents.

These payments, known as the Permanent Fund Dividend, will ensure that Alaska’s oil wealth continues to benefit residents even after reserves run out. This system has allowed Alaska to have no state income tax or state sales tax, a rarity in the US.

More recently, tourism has surged in Alaska, drawing visitors to the state’s national parks and glaciers. Today, Alaska has transformed from a ridiculed purchase into a resource-rich state, built on a mix of natural resource extraction, fishing and tourism.

Meanwhile, despite Alaska’s history of trading land like currency, President Zelenskyy will hope that Friday’s meeting between Trump and Putin does not come at the expense of Ukrainian territory.

OPEC+, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, has agreed to another large production hike in September.

That’s despite a warning by the International Energy Agency, the extra barrels could tip the market into oversupply later this year.

US President Donald Trump’s tariffs have targeted Russian crude buyers.

But whether those tariffs are imposed depends on the outcome of trade negotiations with India and China.

And even more so on talks over a peace deal in Ukraine between Washington and Moscow.

Can the US and Europe break China’s grip on rare earths?

Plus, why is China’s Labubu toy so popular?

Even as the United States slaps India with a 50 percent tariff, the highest among all countries so far and one that will push their relationship to its lowest moment in years, one thing is clear: US President Donald Trump is more interested in onshoring than friend-shoring, experts say.

On Wednesday, the US announced an additional 25 percent tariff on India over its import of Russian oil, taking the total to 50 percent. The move caught most experts by surprise as New Delhi was one of the first to start trade negotiations with Washington, DC, and Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have repeatedly admired each other in public statements and called each other friends. Brazil is the only other country facing tariffs as high as India’s.

“The breakdown of the trade negotiations was a surprise,” said Vina Nadjibulla, vice president of strategy and research at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

“This is a very difficult moment, arguably the worst in many, many years in their relationship and puts India in a very small group of countries that find themselves without a deal and with the highest tariff rates. They now need some pragmatic path forward and need to find a way to rebuild trust,” Nadjibulla said.

While the 50 percent tariffs, set to kick in in three weeks, have come as a shock, there has been a series of events in the past few weeks that hinted at disagreements between the two countries.

Just last week, Trump threatened that he would penalise New Delhi for buying Russian oil and arms, venting his frustration over an impasse in trade talks and referred to both countries as “dead economies”.

Negotiations deadlock

Last year, bilateral trade between India and the US stood at approximately $212bn, with a trade gap of about $46bn in India’s favour. Modi has said in the past that he plans to more than double trade between the two countries to $500bn in the next five years.

As part of the tariff negotiations, New Delhi had offered to remove levies from US industrial goods and said it would increase defence and energy purchases, the Reuters news agency reported. It also offered to scale back taxes on cars, despite a strong auto lobby at home pressuring it not to.

But it refused to remove duties from farm and dairy products, two politically sensitive sectors that employ hundreds of millions of predominantly poor Indians, and a stance similar to some other countries like Canada.

There are also geopolitical layers to what was supposed to be a trade conversation, pointed out Farwa Aamer, director of South Asia Initiatives at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York.

A very public one was the difference in perception on how the latest clash between India and archenemy Pakistan in May was brought to an end. Trump has repeatedly said that he mediated a ceasefire. India has repeatedly said that Trump had no role in bringing about a truce and has said that Modi and Trump never spoke during the conflict.

Pakistan, on the other hand, has said it will nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize and has so far walked away with deals with the US to explore its reserves of critical minerals and oil as its efforts to reset ties with the US play out after years of ambivalence under former US President Joe Biden, said Aamer.

All of this has caused unease for New Delhi, which is now trying to navigate a tough road. “This will test India’s foreign policy,” said Aamer, “and the question is if we will see it grow with the US even as it maintains its ties with Russia,” its longstanding defence and trade partner.

New Delhi has called Wednesday’s tariff “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable” and said its imports of Russian oil are based on its objective of securing the energy needs of its nation of 1.4 billion people.

But beyond that, “India doesn’t want to look weak”, said Aamer. “India has this global standing, and Modi has this global standing, so it has to hold its own. It will maintain its stance that its national security is driving its foreign policy.”

Robert Rogowsky, a professor of international trade at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said he expected “very creative diplomacy” in the “near term” as India and the US try to reset ties despite tensions.

“Strong-arming individuals like Modi will inevitably lead to shifts and counter-shifts,” he told Al Jazeera.

Adding instability

For now, India can focus on strengthening its bilateral trade agreements, said Aamer, such as the one it signed with the United Kingdom last month and another with the European Union, which is currently in the works.

India is also trying to stabilise relations with China –  just as Australia, Canada and Japan have done in recent months since Trump took office and hit allies with tariffs. Modi is planning to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit at the end of the month. It would be his first visit to China since the two countries had a face-off in 2020 in the Galwan River valley.

But the trade blow from the US also comes at a time when India has been trying to position itself as a manufacturing hub and as an option for businesses that were looking to add locations outside China.

In April, Apple, for instance, said all iPhones meant to be sold in the US would be assembled in India by next year. While electronics are exempt for now from the tariffs, a country with a 50 percent tariff tag on it is hardly attractive for business, and this just “adds to the instability and uncertainty that businesses were already feeling” because of all the Trump tariffs, Nadjibulla said.

“Trump has made it clear that he’s interested in onshoring rather than friend-shoring.”

Video shows a massive explosion at a Russian oil facility in Novokuybyshevsk, 1,000km from the Ukrainian border. Ukraine’s military says it used drones to target several sites inside Russia, including refineries, an airfield, and an electronics plant.

Lagos, Nigeria – “Lord, take my soul, but the struggle continues,” the man said, before his body went limp. It swung gently from the makeshift gallows, hurriedly built a few days earlier. Before that morning, the prison had last enforced a death sentence 30 years earlier, during British rule.

It was November 10, 1995.

For weeks, local activists from the small Ogoniland settlement in Nigeria’s lush Niger Delta region had been protesting against oil spills seeping into their farmland and the gas flares choking them. The Niger Delta, which produces the crude that earned Nigeria 80 percent of its foreign revenues, teemed with gun-carrying soldiers from the military dictatorship of the feared General Sani Abacha. They responded to the protests with force.

That day, the loudest Ogoni voice – renowned playwright and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa – faced his fate. A week earlier, a military tribunal had declared his sentence. And just the day before, five executioners tasked with carrying it out had flown in from the northern city of Sokoto.

At 5am that morning, Saro-Wiwa and the eight other Ogoni activists accused alongside him of murder were moved from the army camp where they had been held to the prison grounds in Port Harcourt, the regional hub a few hours drive from Ogoniland. There, they were herded into a room and shackled. Then, one after the other, they were led out to the gallows. Saro-Wiwa went first.

It took five attempts to kill him. After one failed tug, the activist cried out in frustration: “Why are you people treating me like this? What kind of country is this?”

On the final attempt, the gallows finally functioned as they were supposed to. By 3:15pm, all nine men had been executed. Their bodies were placed in coffins, loaded into vehicles and escorted by armed guards to the public cemetery. On the streets, thousands of horrified people watched the procession as soldiers fired tear gas into the air to quell any thoughts of rebellion. No relatives of the nine men were allowed into the cemetery. There were no dignified burials, no parting words from loved ones.

Thirty years later, on June 12 this year, Nigeria’s Democracy Day, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu pardoned Saro-Wiwa and the others – the Ogoni Nine as they had become known. He went on to call them heroes and awarded them prestigious national titles.

For Saro-Wiwa’s daughter Noo Saro-Wiwa, who is now aged 49, and other relatives of the executed men, the pardons were moving but insufficient. In Ogoniland, it reopened old wounds that remained as deep as when they were first inflicted all those years ago.

Saro Wiwa, accidental environmental activist

Before his death at age 54, Saro-Wiwa wanted to be known as a great writer.

A bundle of energy, he dabbled in many things, but books were his true love. More than two dozen books, poems and essays bore his name. His radio dramas and TV plays were wildly successful, particularly one that mocked the corrupt Nigerian elite, which took over after independence in 1960. In the short story Africa Kills Her Sun, Saro-Wiwa eerily warned of his killing: A man condemned to death pens a long letter to his lover, Zole, on the eve of his execution, telling her not to grieve.

Saro-Wiwa’s execution made him a martyr for the Ogoni people – the man whose death drew international attention to their plight.

In 1958, when Nigeria discovered oil in the southern Niger Delta, of which Ogoniland is a part, a 17-year-old Saro-Wiwa wrote letters to the government and oil companies questioning how delta communities would benefit from oil dollars. Later on, his essays highlighted how Ogoniland still lacked infrastructure – roads, electricity, water – despite the oil.

In October 1990, Saro-Wiwa led the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which he cofounded, to present the Ogoni Bill of Rights to the Nigerian government. In it, the Ogoni people denounced the dominance of the majority tribes (Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo) and the sidelining of minorities like the Ogoni. They called for political autonomy and direct control of oil profits, saying:

“Thirty years of Nigerian independence has done no more than outline the wretched quality of the leadership of the Nigerian majority ethnic groups and their cruelty as they have plunged the nation into ethnic strife, carnage, war, dictatorship, retrogression and the greatest waste of national resources ever witnessed in world history, turning generations of Nigerians, born and unborn into perpetual debtors.”

It marked Saro-Wiwa as a thorn in the side of the military dictators, and from 1992 to 1993, he was arrested without charge several times. Still, he continued to condemn the slow death he said Ogonis were sentenced to.

“I accuse the oil companies of practising genocide against the Ogoni,” he wrote in one article. The Nigerian government, he said, was complicit.

Saro-Wiwa’s fervour took hold in Ogoniland. About 300,000 Ogonis, out of a population of half a million, marched with him in January 1993 to peacefully protest against the Nigerian government and Shell, the oil company that they said bore particular responsibility for the oil spills in their part of the delta.

It was one of the largest mass demonstrations Nigeria had ever seen at the time. Protesters carried signs with messages like: “Assassins, go home.” The protests were so large that the world began to notice the Ogonis and the slight, articulate man speaking for them. Soon, he was speaking at the United Nations, presenting the Ogonis’ case there. Environmental rights groups like Greenpeace noted and supported his activism.

By the end of that year, riots were breaking out, and angry protesters had destroyed oil pipelines worth billions of dollars. Shell was forced to suspend operations. The government promptly deployed a special task force to suppress what is now known as the Ogoni Rebellion. Soldiers brutally put down protests, carried out extrajudicial killings, and raped and tortured scores of people, according to reports by Amnesty International.

In-fighting and mob actions in Ogoniland

By 1994 and with soldiers still in Ogoniland, tensions were running high. Splits within the MOSOP leadership were also emerging with one side, led by Saro-Wiwa, calling for a stronger stance against the government and another preaching pacifism.

Edward Kobani was a childhood friend of Saro-Wiwa’s. He was also a pacifist who opposed his friend’s mobilisation of young people in rallies that rang with angry rhetoric. His stance against violence upturned their relationship. More broadly, the mood in the region was turning against the pacifists, who were increasingly seen as sellouts colluding with the military regime and Shell although there is no evidence they were working with either.

On May 21, 1994, word spread that some MOSOP leaders had gathered for a meeting at the chief’s palace in Ogoniland’s Gokana district but soldiers had blocked Saro-Wiwa from entering the area. Incensed, rioters marched to the meeting point and attacked those they could lay their hands on. Four of them – Kobani, Alfred Badey, and the brothers Samuel and Theophilus Orage, who were Saro-Wiwa’s in-laws – were clubbed with everything from broken bottles to sharpened rakes. Then they were set on fire.

The Nigerian military immediately accused Saro-Wiwa of inciting the killings and arrested him the next day. At a news conference, the military administrator of Rivers State, which Ogoniland is part of, declared MOSOP a “terror group” and Saro Wiwa, a “dictator who has … no room for dissenting views”. Eight other MOSOP leaders were arrested: Nordu Eawo, Saturday Dobee, John Kpuine, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Daniel Gbooko, Barinem Kiobel and Baribor Bera.

In detention, the men were reportedly chained, beaten and denied medication or visits. Amnesty International described their trial by military tribunal as a “sham”. Civilian defence lawyers were assaulted and their evidence discarded. In protest, the lawyers boycotted the hearings.

Reports at the time described how Saro-Wiwa, knowing he was already condemned, looked ahead blankly or flipped through a newspaper in court.

Fighting for justice for the Ogoni Nine

Noo Saro-Wiwa was 19 and in her second year of college when her father was executed. Born in Port Harcourt, she lived and studied in London. On the day of the execution, she had no inkling that her world had changed. It wasn’t until late that night that her mother, Maria, managed to reach her on her landline.

Her first reaction was shock. Noo, who is now a travel writer and author based in London, told Al Jazeera in a phone call that it was hard to imagine the man who would amble into her room while she idled on her bed and thrust a book in her face with a “Read this!” could be killed in such a way. After all, powerful international voices had spoken up to pressure the Nigerian government to release him: Nelson Mandela was among them.

Noo’s brother, Ken, was in New Zealand to attend the opening of the annual Commonwealth of Nations meeting and press for Nigeria’s suspension. The association of former British colonial states was an important aid avenue for Nigeria at the time.

The world, too, reacted with shock. Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth, and the United States and several other countries severed diplomatic ties. Noo remembers wondering why United Kingdom news channels were repeatedly running the story. That’s when it dawned on Noo how great her father’s task had been.

Her family was determined to get justice, but it was a long road, Noo explained. In 1996, her brother and uncle sued Shell, which the Ogoni Nine families accused of complicity by aiding the military. Shell denied the allegations.

The case, filed in the US under a law that allows for jurisdiction in foreign matters, dragged on until 2009 when the company settled for $15.5m. Shell said it was “humanitarian and legal fees”.

It mostly went towards paying lawyers and establishing a trust fund that still provides scholarships to Ogoni students, Noo said. It’s annoying, though, she added, that critics claim her family and the others got rich on the settlement.

“It was a tiny amount,” she said. “And even if it weren’t, who wants their parent killed for a $15m settlement?”

For many years, Noo said, she couldn’t bear to visit Nigeria or hear the name “Shell” without feeling overwhelmed. The company was also taken to The Hague in 2017 by a group of Ogoni Nine widows with the support of Amnesty International; however, a judge ruled there was no evidence that Shell was complicit in the government executions.

Meanwhile, Amnesty said in a 2017 report that it had found evidence that Shell executives had met with military officials and “encouraged” them to suppress protests. The company, the report said, transported soldiers and in “at least one instance paid a military commander notorious for human rights violations”.

Shell denied the claims and said it pleaded with the government for clemency for the Ogoni Nine.

Noo has since found the strength to visit Ogoniland. She first went back in 2005, 10 years after her father’s execution. The region has become even more volatile as ethnic militias now patrol the creeks, attacking soldiers, controlling oil pipelines and kidnapping oil workers at sea.

Noo said her next book will focus on the devastation in her homeland. Her brother and mother died in the past decade, leaving her and Zina, her US-based twin sister. The losses set her back, she said, but she now frequently travels back home to document the oil spills, which are still going on, although Shell never resumed operations after the 1993 protests.

Life as a writer abroad contrasts jarringly with her life back home, Noo said. One week, she is walking down the streets of Paris, and the next, she is standing in oil-soaked farms in Ogoniland. But her work in Nigeria, she added, reminds her of her father’s struggle.

“My father was a real kind of David vs Goliath,” Noo said. “Most people back then had never even heard of Ogoni. As I get older, I’m just always more in awe of what he achieved. It was quite incredible.”

Too little, too late?

Shell’s leaky pipes continue to pump oil into the earth all these years later, environmental groups say. The company, which plans to sell its onshore assets and exit the Niger Delta after so many years of controversy, has always claimed its pipes are being sabotaged.

Calculated or accidental, the oily devastation is visible in the eerie stillness of Ogoniland’s mangroves, which should be alive with the sounds of chirping insects and croaking frogs. In the murky rivers floating with oil, old, stooped fishermen cast nets that bring up air.

Nubari Saatah, an Ogoni, has long advocated for Ogonis to control their oil wealth, just as activists before him did. The president of the Niger Delta Congress political movement said Ogonis have remained resentful since the rebellion, primarily because Nigeria has not repaired the ruptured relationship or rectified injustices by giving Ogonis control over their land.

Saatah, author of the 2022 book What We Must Do: Towards a Niger Delta Revolution, regularly appears on radio and TV shows to comment on the Niger Delta crisis and often places the blame for the region’s instability at the government’s doorstep.

“The violent militancy that engulfed the Niger Delta was a direct reaction to the violence visited on the peaceful methods employed by Ogoni,” Saatah said.

“Unfortunately for the Ogoni, the executions brought about a leadership vacuum that has still not been filled till today,” he added.

A UN Environmental Programme report in 2011 found that more than 50 years of oil extraction in Ogoniland had caused the water in much of the region to be contaminated with extremely high levels of toxic hydrocarbons like benzene. In one village, benzene in the groundwater was up to 900 times the accepted World Health Organization standard.

Cleaning up the devastation and restoring the land would require the “world’s most wide-ranging and long-term oil clean-up exercise ever undertaken”, the report said.

Although Nigeria and Shell committed in 2012 to a clean-up through the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP), more than a decade later, progress has been slow and hard to measure, critics said.

Saatah blamed the government for the lack of results. Abuja, he said, has not funded the programme as promised. To Ogonis, that feels like a message that the government does not care, he added. Shell, meanwhile, has contributed $270m to the project. Al Jazeera reached out to HYPREP for comment but did not receive a response.

Still, there is some change, Saatah noted. When the clean-up started, government authorities installed a sign at the community well in Saatah’s village of Bomu that read: “Warning! Do not drink this water.”

People hardly glanced at the post as they fetched their drinking water, largely because there were no alternative water sources. In the past five or so years, however, HYPREP has installed potable water tanks in Bomu. Saatah worries, though, about whether the government will maintain the costs in the long run and whether the burden will be put on his community.

Some in Ogoniland see Abuja’s renewed interest through the recent pardoning of the Ogoni Nine as suspicious, coming as it does at a time when Nigeria is in the throes of one of its worst financial declines and when the government is desperate to extract and sell more crude oil.

Resuming active exploration in Ogoniland, which stopped in 1993, could yield up to 500,000 barrels of crude per day, a MOSOP official, which is still operating, told reporters last year. That would be on top of the current 1.7 million barrels per day produced from other parts of the delta.

“The lines are there to be connected between oil resumption and the pardon of the Ogoni Nine,” Saatah said. The pardons, he said, were to sweeten the Ogoni people and avoid any opposition.

As things stand, though, Ogoni communities are unlikely to agree to renewed exploration, he added, first, because locals still cannot control oil profits and, second, because rather than make Ogonis happy, Tinubu’s pardoning of the Ogoni Nine has only worsened tensions internally, Saatah said.

Rifts that emerged during the 1994 crisis have not healed. The fact that the president’s speech did not acknowledge the four murdered MOSOP members in the mob action that led to Saro-Wiwa’s arrest has angered their families and supporters, some of whom fault the aggressive stance of Saro-Wiwa for what happened.

Noo and the Ogoni Nine families are not completely satisfied with the government’s move either.

The national honour was a welcome surprise, Noo said, but the pardons were not enough.

“A pardon suggests that something, that a crime had been committed in the first place,” she said. “But nothing’s been committed.”

What she wants, she added, is for the conviction of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine to be thrown out of the country’s history books.

Jennifer Geerlings-Simons to lead the impoverished Latin American country through crisis before oil wealth arrives.

Suriname has elected Jennifer Geerlings-Simons as its first female president, with parliament backing the 71-year-old physician and lawmaker to lead the crisis-hit South American nation.

Her election came after a coalition deal was struck in the National Assembly, which voted by a two-thirds majority on Sunday.

The move followed inconclusive May polls and mounting pressure to replace outgoing President Chandrikapersad Santokhi, whose tenure was marred by corruption scandals and harsh austerity.

Geerlings-Simons, leader of the National Democratic Party, ran unopposed and will take office on July 16.

“I am aware that the heavy task I have taken on is further aggravated by the fact that I am the first woman to serve the country in this position,” she said after her confirmation.

She will be joined by running mate Gregory Rusland, as the pair inherit a country struggling under the weight of economic hardship, reduced subsidies, and widespread frustration. While Santokhi’s government managed to restructure debt and restore macroeconomic stability with IMF backing, it also triggered mass protests over deep cuts.

With Suriname expected to begin producing offshore oil in 2028, Geerlings-Simons has promised to focus on stabilising state finances. She has previously pledged to boost revenues by tightening tax collection, including from small-scale gold miners.

Economists warn she faces a rocky road ahead. Winston Ramautarsingh, former head of the national economists’ association, said Suriname must repay about $400m annually in debt servicing.

“Suriname does not have that money,” he said. “The previous government rescheduled the debts, but that was only a postponement.”

Geerlings-Simons will now be tasked with steering the Dutch-speaking country of 646,000 people through a fragile period, balancing public discontent with the promise of future oil wealth.

As Suriname prepares to mark 50 years since gaining independence from the Netherlands this November, the small South American country is pinning its hopes on a new era driven by oil wealth and deepening ties with China.

In 2019, it joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, becoming one of the first Latin American states to sign on to the vast infrastructure project.

Suriname is one of the continent’s poorest nations, despite its rich ethnic tapestry that includes descendants of Africans, Indigenous groups, Indians, Indonesians, Chinese, and Dutch settlers.

Through the 12 days of the recent Israel-Iran conflict, China moved quickly to position itself as a potential mediator and voice of reason amid a spiralling regional crisis.

The day after Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran on June 13, Beijing reached out to both sides to express its desire for a mediated solution even as the country’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, condemned Israel’s actions as a violation of international law.

Chinese President Xi Jinping soon followed with calls for de-escalation, while at the United Nations Security Council, China joined Russia and Pakistan in calling for an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire”.

When Iran threatened to blockade the strategically important Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes, Beijing was also quick to speak out.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs instead called for the “international community to step up efforts to de-escalate conflicts and prevent regional turmoil from having a greater impact on global economic development”.

Beijing’s stance throughout the conflict remained true to its longstanding noninterference approach to foreign hostilities. But experts say it did little to help shore up its ambition of becoming an influential player in the Middle East, and instead exposed the limitations of its clout in the region.

Why China was worried

Unlike some countries, and the United States in particular, China traditionally approaches foreign policy “through a lens of strategic pragmatism rather than ideological solidarity”, said Evangeline Cheng, a research associate at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

This approach means China will always focus on protecting its economic interests, of which it has many in the Middle East, Cheng told Al Jazeera.

China has investments in Israel’s burgeoning tech sector and its Belt and Road infrastructure project spans Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Critically, China relies on the Middle East for more than half of its crude oil imports, and it’s the top consumer of Iranian oil. A protracted war would have disrupted its oil supplies, as would an Iranian blockade of the strategically important Strait of Hormuz – something threatened by Tehran’s parliament during the conflict.

“War and security instability not only undermines Chinese investment and trade and business… but also the oil price and gas energy security in general,” said Alam Saleh, a senior Lecturer in Iranian Studies at the Australian National University.

“Therefore, China seeks stability, and it disagrees and opposes any kind of military solution for any type of conflict and confrontations, no matter with whom,” he said.

John Gong, a professor of economics at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, told Al Jazeera that China’s top concern through the conflict was to avoid “skyrocketing oil prices” that would threaten its energy security.

Flexing diplomatic muscle, protecting economic might

Aware of China’s friendly relations with Iran and Beijing’s economic fears, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on Beijing to keep Tehran from closing the Strait of Hormuz as ceasefire negotiations stumbled forward this week.

It was a brief moment of acknowledgement of Beijing’s influence, but experts say China’s overall diplomatic influence remains limited.

“China’s offer to mediate highlights its desire to be seen as a responsible global player, but its actual leverage remains limited,” Cheng said. “Without military capabilities or deep political influence in the region, and with Israel wary of Beijing’s ties to Iran, China’s role is necessarily constrained.”

To be sure, Beijing has demonstrated its ability to broker major diplomatic deals in the region. In 2023, it mediated the normalisation of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. While seen as a huge diplomatic win for China, experts say Beijing owed much of its success to fellow mediators, Oman and Iraq. China also mediated an agreement between Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Fatah, in July 2024, under which they committed to working together on Gaza’s governance after the end of Israel’s ongoing war on the enclave.

But William Yang, a senior analyst for Northeast Asia at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said the odds were stacked against China from the beginning of the latest conflict due to Israel’s wariness towards its relationship with Iran.

In 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-year “strategic partnership”, and Iran is an active participant in the Belt and Road project. Iran has also joined the Beijing-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and this year took part in China’s “Maritime Security Belt” naval exercises.

Iran’s “resolute opposition to American hegemony” also aligns well with China’s diplomatic interests more broadly, compared with Israel’s close ties to the US, Yang said.

China’s dilemma

It’s a scenario that could be repeated in the future, he said.

“This case also reinforces the dilemma that China faces: while it wants to be viewed as a great power that is capable of mediating in major global conflicts, its close relationship with specific parties in some of the ongoing conflicts diminishes Beijing’s ability to play such a role,” Yang said.

For now, Beijing will continue to rely on the US as a security guarantor in the region, he added.

“It’s clear that China will continue to focus on deepening economic engagement with countries in the Middle East while taking advantage of the US presence in the region, which remains the primary security guarantor for regional countries,” Yang said.

“On the other hand, the US involvement in the conflict, including changing the course of the war by bombing Iranian nuclear sites, creates the condition for China to take the moral high ground in the diplomatic sphere and present itself as the more restrained, calm and responsible major power,” he said.

EU leaders gather in Brussels to address sanctions on Russia, US tariffs, and Middle East conflicts.

The heads of the European Union’s 27 member nations will meet in Brussels to discuss tougher sanctions on Russia, ways to prevent painful new United States tariffs, and how to make their voices heard in the Middle East conflicts.

Most of the leaders will arrive at the event taking place on Thursday from a brief but intense NATO summit, where they pledged a big boost in defence spending and papered over some of their differences with US President Donald Trump.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will join the EU summit by videoconference, after having met Trump on Wednesday.

US-led NATO downgraded Ukraine from a top priority to a side player this week, but Russia’s war in Ukraine remains of paramount concern for the EU.

Members will be discussing a potential 18th round of sanctions against Russia and whether to maintain a price cap on Russian oil, measures that some nations oppose because it could raise energy prices.

Meanwhile, Trump’s threatened tariffs are weighing on the EU, which negotiates trade deals on behalf of all 27 member countries. He lashed out at Spain on Wednesday for not spending more on defence and suggested yet more tariffs. France’s president criticised Trump for starting a trade war with longtime allies.

European leaders are also concerned about fallout from the wars in the Middle East, and the EU is pushing to revive diplomatic negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

EU members have internal disagreements to overcome. They are divided over what to do about European policy towards Israel because of its conduct in its war on Gaza. And left-leaning parties are attacking European Commissioner Ursula von Der Leyen’s pivot away from the EU’s climate leadership in favour of military investment.

Defence and security are likely to top the agenda. The summit will end with a statement of conclusions that will set the agenda for the bloc for the next four months, and can be seen as a bellwether for political sentiment in Europe on key regional and global issues.

Oil prices hit a five-month high over the weekend after the United States struck Iran’s nuclear facilities. Tehran retaliated with an attack on the US Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, keeping global energy markets on edge.

But oil prices dropped sharply on Tuesday after it appeared that Iran was holding off further attacks for now, including avoiding closing the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint in global trade.

Brent Crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, has tumbled more than 5.6 percent so far in the trading day and is currently trading at around $66 a barrel.

Strait of Hormuz closure still a concern

One of Iran’s most significant potential retaliatory economic measures would be to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.

The narrow waterway is a key transit route for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, as well as a broader trade corridor between Europe and Asia.

While Iran’s parliament has backed a proposal to close the strait, the final decision lies with the country’s Supreme National Security Council.

Iran has made similar threats in the past, including in 2018 during US President Donald Trump’s first term, after the US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal brokered under former President Barack Obama.

A closure could involve laying sea mines across the strait – which at its narrowest point is just 33 kilometres (21 miles) wide – and even attack or capture vessels. As recently as March, the Revolutionary Guard seized ships it accused of smuggling diesel. Similar tactics were used during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

Shutting the Strait would send a jolt through global markets, though analysts believe there is enough spare capacity to blunt the immediate impact. Still, the risk of further volatility remains high, mirroring the energy market disruptions seen in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

HSBC analysts say that crude oil prices could top $80 a barrel if the Strait is closed. Goldman Sachs forecasts that it could be $110.

But the strike on the US airbase in Qatar actually calmed global markets because it suggested that economic retaliation is not at the forefront of Tehran’s arsenal.

“If Iran were serious about retaliation, it would sink an oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz. The fact that it isn’t doing that means it’s bending the knee,” Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in a post on the social media platform X.

Moment of flux

Outside of the conflict, the oil market was already in a moment of flux. In May, OPEC agreed to increase production by as much as 411,000 barrels per day for the month of July, part of a move to unwind voluntary output cuts after demand crashed during the COVID pandemic.

There are other ways to mitigate the impact of a supply shortage.

Spare production capacity from OPEC+, primarily in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, could quickly add about 2.5 million barrels per day to the market, with as much as five million available over the longer term, according to analysis from Third Bridge Capital.

That could buy time if there is a hit on global oil supplies before it ultimately impacts consumers at the gas pump.

Iran produces 4 percent of the global oil supply, most of which goes to China due to existing global sanctions on Iranian oil.

“It’s hard to see in the current environment how Iran would push more barrels into the market since a lot of their supply ends up going to China,” Peter McNally, global head of Sector Analysts and global sector lead at Third Bridge Capital, told Al Jazeera.

China purchases nearly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, totalling about 1.6 million barrels per day. China is already grappling with US tariffs and any increase in energy prices will hurt its economy, says Abigail Hall Blanco, professor of economics at the University of Tampa.

“Oil markets are incredibly interconnected. And so if the price of oil globally shoots up as a result of a closure or a restriction of oil tankers passing through the strait, then certainly you would see those impacts on the US and other markets as well,” Hall Blanco told Al Jazeera.

Earlier this morning, Trump said that China can continue to buy Iranian oil.

Meanwhile, regional producers are bracing for a fallout. Iraq’s state-run Basra Oil Company has begun evacuating foreign staff, fearing Iranian retaliation against US forces stationed in the area.

Western firms are also taking precautions. BP, which partners with Iraq’s Basra operation in the massive Rumaila oil field – averaging 3.32 million barrels per day – has reduced its on-site personnel. However, the company says output will not be affected. As of 3pm in New York (19:00 GMT), BP’s stock is down by 1.4 percent.

Outside OPEC+, producers like Brazil, Canada, Guyana and the US could increase output to help fill any supply gap. But with the exception of the US and Canada, the other countries take longer to make those moves, experts said.

“The difference with everyone except the US is just its bit longer lead time. There’s less of an instantaneous response to higher prices. The growth is going to continue. If there is an outage, by way of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, the quickest [way] to add production is either in Saudi Arabia, the UAE or the US,” McNally said. “But like longer term, the non-OPEC supply will continue to meet most of the demand growth going forward.”

Over the past decade, non-OPEC countries have significantly ramped up production, a trend that’s expected to continue. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) projected in December (PDF) that 90 percent of oil production growth this year will come from non-OPEC sources.

The US also has a strategic petroleum reserve at its disposal that currently holds 402.5 million barrels. The reserve is intended to be tapped into in moments of a dip in production due to global emergencies.

While the US does produce more oil than any other country in the world, at current levels, it will cost $20bn and several years to refill the strategic reserve.

A political risk for Trump

On Monday, Trump on Truth Social said in all-caps, “EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN, I’M WATCHING.”

Trump campaigned on cutting prices for everyday goods. But his volatile trade policies and tariffs have pushed prices upward. In the most recent consumer price index report, a key metric the central bank uses to measure the rate of inflation, food prices are up 2.9 percent compared to this time last year.

But oil has remained a key strength for the Trump administration, with prices dropping, including a 12 percent decline in gas prices from this time last year.

But that could change very quickly as prices fluctuate.

“It’s just that it’s a fluid situation,” McNally said.

Israel and Iran are in the second week of the conflict.

As well as inflicting damage, both countries are putting their economies under strain.

Israel has spent billions of dollars on its war on Gaza and has upped its spending considerably with its largely air-based attacks on Iran.

Iran was already struggling with the years of sanctions and now its oil and gas facilities are being hit.

So can the two nations sustain the conflict? Which is likely to be worst affected?

And will the conflict eventually damage the global economy?

Presenter: Neave Barker

Guests:

Aly-Khan Satchu – Geoeconomic analyst and investor

Eyal Winter – Professor of economics at the Hebrew University and Lancaster University

Nader Habibi – Professor of practice in the economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University

Here are the key events on day 1,213 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Here is how things stand on Saturday, June 21:

Fighting

• Drones and missiles launched by Russia overnight have damaged energy infrastructure in central Ukraine’s Kremenchuk district in Poltava, said local military authorities.
• One person was injured in the attack, according to Volodymyr Kohut, the region’s military governor, who did not provide further details on the extent of the damage.
• Russia had targeted the district’s refinery, according to a report by online news outlet Strana.ua.

Politics and diplomacy

• Ukraine and Russia exchange more prisoners of war, officials from both countries said, the second swap in two days under an agreement struck in Turkiye earlier this month. All the captured soldiers were wounded, ill or under 25 years old. Neither side said how many soldiers had been freed.
• At Russia’s flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg, President Vladimir Putin said he did not “rule out” his forces taking control of Ukraine’s northeastern city of Sumy as part of efforts to create a buffer zone along the border.
• The Sumy region is not one of the regions Moscow has formally annexed, although Russian forces have recently made inroads there for the first time in three years, with Putin claiming his troops had advanced up to 12km (7 miles) in the region.
• In a string of hawkish remarks, Putin also appeared to repeat his denial of Ukrainian statehood. Ukraine said Putin’s comments showed “disdain” for the peace process.
• The German military considers Russia to be an “existential risk” to the country and Europe, according to a Spiegel news magazine report that cites a new Bundeswehr strategy paper. Russia is verifiably preparing for a conflict with NATO, particularly by strengthening forces in western Russia “at the borders with NATO,” the report cites the strategy paper as saying. Germany can only counter this threat “with a consistent development of military and society-wide capabilities,” the document concludes.
• Putin has reaffirmed Moscow’s opposition to the spread of weapons of mass destruction, including any potential acquisition by Iran. Putin told Sky News Arabia that Russia supports Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, emphasising that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no evidence suggesting Tehran seeks to build nuclear weapons. Putin also stated that Russia is prepared to assist Iran in the development of its civilian nuclear programme.

Economy

• At the economic forum in St Petersburg, Putin also urged officials not to let Russia fall into recession “under any circumstances”, as some in his own government warned of a hit to economic growth. Economists have warned for months of a slowdown in the Russian economy, with the country posting just 1.4 percent year-on-year growth in the first quarter of 2025, the weakest pace in two years.
• A decision by the OPEC+ group of leading global oil producers to speed up production now looks far-sighted and justified amid the Middle East conflict, said Igor Sechin, head of Russia’s largest oil producer Rosneft, at the forum. Sechin also said that there will be no oil glut in the long term despite the production rise, and that the European Union seeks to reduce Russia’s oil cap to $45 to improve the profitability of its purchases, not to cut Russia’s budget revenues.