Congratulations to Washington Post for offering a different perspective why Russia invaded Ukraine.
It's not a coincidence that TerraManta shares this perspective since 2014 when Russia illegally annexed Crimea but for the same reason.
Returning to 2014 (better yet - 2012)
In August 2012, Ukraine announced an accord with an Exxon-led group to extract oil and gas from the depths of Ukraine’s Black Sea waters. The Exxon team had outbid Lukoil, a Russian company. Ukraine’s state geology bureau said development of the field would cost up to $12 billion.
“When Russia seized Crimea in March, it acquired not just the Crimean landmass but also a maritime zone more than three times its size with the rights to underwater resources potentially worth trillions of dollars"
The oil and gas reserves in the Black Sea are not frequently published but they are vast and the potential may in fact rival or exceed that of the North Sea. Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and other major oil companies have already explored the Black Sea.
Ukraine: Home to Large Reserves ...
... of titanium, iron ore, lithium, and massive deposits of coal.
“$12.4 trillion of Ukraine’s energy deposits, metals and minerals are now under Russian control, according to SecDev - a Canadian geopolitical risk firm."
Including Rare Earth Metals
“In 2021, the European Union signed a strategic partnership on raw materials with Ukraine, which generated a surge in interest from private companies.”
Despite benefiting from the fourth-largest rare earth metals reserves in the world, Russia has always struggled to scale its output in this sector. Although the country is a major global supplier of palladium, scandium, and titanium, as well as an important seller of nickel and cobalt, it was not perceived as one of the main players in global markets, dominated first and foremost by China. In 2020, the Kremlin pledged the equivalent of $1.5 billion of investments in rare earth metals, in an attempt to become the second-largest producer after China, by 2030. But the fruits of this initiative are yet to materialize.
On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
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