MOSCOW, April 6. /TASS/. Washington and Tehran are exchanging threats of hell, and London is looking to undermine efforts to achieve peace in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the ongoing Middle East conflict poses a risk of a major environmental crisis. These stories topped Monday’s newspaper headlines across Russia.
Vedomosti: US, Iran exchange threats of hell
Iran is not negotiating the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz with the United States and is ready to repel a potential US ground invasion of its territory, an Iranian diplomat told Vedomosti ahead of the April 6 deadline set by President Donald Trump to make a peace deal. According to the diplomat, a potential US ground operation against the Islamic Republic will be the weakest link in the American military and political strategy in the region. "If the armed confrontation escalates to a new stage, our army will be capable of destroying multiple American soldiers," he warned.
As he set a new 48-hour deadline for Iran, Trump promised on his Truth Social platform that the Iranians will face hell unless they reopen the critical waterway. In a response address on April 5, Ali Abdollahi, the commander of the Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters, warned that the Islamic Republic will open the gates of hell for the US and Israel if they continue to strike Iranian energy facilities.
The senior Iranian military commander issued the warning after Iranian air defenses shot down two US warplanes, an F-15E fighter jet and an A-10C Thunderbolt II attack aircraft, for the first time since the conflict began. The US command launched a large-scale operation to rescue the F-15E pilot and second pilot in southern Iran, Fox News and Al Jazeera reported, citing sources.
Despite the losses, the course of hostilities has been in favor of Iran, Yury Lyamin, a senior researcher at the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, told Vedomosti. According to him, while the plan for a swift victory failed for the US and Israeli armies, the Islamic Republic is demonstrating significant institutional resilience as it has been increasing the political and economic costs of the war for its adversaries by the day. In this situation, it has been hard so far to predict how Trump will act to turn the tide of the war in his favor, the expert noted: "The US military will perhaps continue to attack key facilities of Iran’s infrastructure and economy or even attempt a limited ground operation, as Washington does not have enough resources to launch a major offensive."
According to Vladimir Vasilyev, chief research fellow at the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, a recent move by Trump to fire senior US military officials who opposed the military operation may indirectly indicate that the US is willing to launch a ground invasion of Iran. The Trump administration’s push to increase military spending from $1.1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in Congress at the expense of social expenditure may pave the way for a new stage of the war, the expert said. "The president is thus planning to boost and upgrade industrial production. Congress may as well approve this request," the political analyst added.
Izvestia: Britain looks to disrupt efforts to resolve Ukraine conflict again
Britain is implicated in recent Ukrainian drone attacks on northwest Russia’s Leningrad Region, Russian Ambassador to London Andrey Kelin told Izvestia. According to him, the UK is seeking to intensify the Ukraine conflict. While the US earlier demanded that Kiev withdraw troops from areas of Donbass under its control in exchange for security guarantees, Britain has been seeking to disrupt this plan.
London is pressing ahead with full-scale support for Ukraine across the board and is wagering on Russia’s defeat; therefore, it is trying to prevent Kiev from ceding land and ending the hostilities, Natalya Yeryomina, a professor at St. Petersburg State University, told Izvestia. "London views the Ukraine crisis as key in defining its future global posture. They will not relinquish their support for Kiev," the expert emphasized.
Even as the UK has continued to provide comprehensive support to Ukraine and may even intensify it, any increase in weapons and ammunition production will not enable Britain to replace US supplies, which have been redirected to the Persian Gulf, Kelin continued. "In a push for something new, London and its allies have been positioning Kiev not only as a recipient of Western assistance but as a key partner that has obtained the latest military technology and skills from its military conflict with Russia," the diplomat explained.
According to Yeryomina, London has signed multiple agreements with Ukraine and has made extensive commitments, but the UK has been struggling to deliver on its promises amid rising energy prices. Now Britain is actively working with the Baltic and Nordic countries with the aim of sharing these guarantees.
"Germany, Nordic countries, Poland, and the Baltic states may become key donors in this scenario, which will be opposed by most countries in Southern Europe. Obviously, the financial commitments of individual countries will be constrained by domestic factors," political analyst Yegor Belyachkov, who specializes in Germanic studies, told Izvestia.
In any case, Britain and the EU will try to put pressure on Trump. Despite his strong statements questioning US participation in NATO, the US leader has not taken specific steps, particularly ahead of a state visit by King Charles III of Britain to Washington later this month. The British monarch reportedly discussed the Ukraine conflict with Trump last fall. Therefore, Charles III may also try to persuade the US leader to continue supporting Ukraine.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta: Middle East conflict may trigger major environmental crisis
Apart from the impact on the oil market and the broader global economy, the military conflict in the Middle East has already dealt a major blow to the environment across the region. The war may even trigger a major environmental crisis that would affect not only Gulf countries.
All strikes have primarily targeted critical infrastructure, which has caused multiple emergency equipment failures, resulting in an uncontrolled volume of emissions and waste, Dmitry Gusev, chairman of the supervisory board of Nadyozhny Partnyor (Reliable Partner) Association, noted.
A month into the hostilities, CO2 emissions in the region have risen to almost 10 million metric tons or have even exceeded this level, some estimates suggest. According to The Guardian, the war is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined.
The concentration of oil tankers and around 1,900 other vessels stuck in the Persian Gulf amid the Hormuz Strait closure also presents a potential danger, with a very high likelihood of them being struck by a missile or a drone.
Valeriya Popova, a senior analyst at Rikom-Trust investment company, told Rossiyskaya Gazeta that attacks on oil and gas infrastructure in the Middle East pose a cascade of environmental risks, ranging from local pollution to longer-term impacts on environmental systems and consequences for the climate.
It is too early to estimate the environmental damage to the region, Andrey Makarov, deputy director of operational risks and sustainable development at Kept, argued. Predicting how the situation in the region will develop is difficult, even as the severity of consequences for regional environmental systems will directly depend on how the conflict evolves, he said.
Kommersant: OPEC+ agrees on a modest oil output increase amid Hormuz closure
The eight OPEC+ producers have agreed to raise quotas by 206,000 barrels per day for May, allowing Russia to increase oil production by 62,000 bpd. The members also coordinated a similar increase a month ago. Bottlenecks in the Strait of Hormuz will not allow them to immediately increase oil supply, while a higher quota increase could have caused a post-conflict market surplus, experts say.
Sergey Teryoshkin, CEO of Open Oil Market, told Kommersant that the leading oil exporters in the Middle East cannot raise oil output sharply "here and now." Therefore, he explained, the OPEC+ countries made what he called a preliminary move to increase the quotas by an amount that is realistic for the market and that could be guaranteed as soon as the situation with shipping in the Hormuz Strait improves. This means maintaining the status quo for the market, with Brent prices hovering near $110 per barrel. And the cartel could raise production without surpassing the quotas after the acute stage of the conflict, Teryoshkin continued.
Andrey Polishchuk, a senior oil and gas analyst at Euler, says more radical steps could have caused a surplus after normalization. Igor Yushkov, an expert at the Financial University under the Russian Government, told Kommersant that the OPEC+ decision to raise the quotas in a situation when Gulf countries cannot use them in full reflects the alliance’s ambition to show it keeps the situation under control. The longer the conflict lasts, the more damage will be done to the region’s oil infrastructure, and the question arises as to exactly how much oil the countries could export after the reopening of the Hormuz Strait.
In February, OPEC estimates showed, Russia actually produced 9.18 million bpd, or 400,000 bpd less than the February quota. However, Kirill Bakhtin, chief Russian stock market analyst at BCS World of Investments, believes that the country stands a good chance of increasing crude production amid growing oil prices and if there is confirmation that recent attacks on ports in the Leningrad Region caused only minor damage. "While an increase in production will bring additional revenues to both companies and the Finance Ministry, much will depend on whether the flow of oil at key export ports is uninterrupted," Teryoshkin noted.
Izvestia: Belgrade, Budapest set to protect Russian gas imports
Serbian lawmakers are planning to meet with President Aleksandar Vucic and ask him to convene an emergency parliament meeting in the wake of an attempted attack on the TurkStream pipeline later Monday, Dragan Stanojevic, who heads the committee on the Serbian diaspora, told Izvestia.
On April 5, Vucic told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that explosives and detonators were detected near the major gas pipeline. Budapest has already condemned the sabotage plot as an attack on its sovereignty. Later on Sunday, Serbian counterintelligence revealed that the suspect is a migrant with a military background. The Balkan country’s parliament said Ukrainian special services may be implicated in the attempted attack. As a result, Serbia and Hungary may even sever diplomatic relations with Kiev, experts say. However, they will more likely intensify measures to protect the gas pipeline.
Belgrade will have to set up regular patrols of all possible sites where sabotage may occur, Oleg Bondarenko, a political scientist and director of the Progressive Policy Foundation, said in an interview with Izvestia. At the same time, the roots of the failed terror attack can be traced specifically to Ukraine, he argues. "There will be implications for relations with Ukraine not only for Serbia but for the broader Balkan Peninsula," he said. Diplomatic relations between Hungary and Ukraine, as well as ties with Serbia and other countries that have a different vision of the situation, may be severed, he continued.
Program Manager at the Russian International Affairs Council Milan Lazovic, on the contrary, does not expect any drastic steps from Belgrade toward Kiev, including the severance of diplomatic relations. Vucic will probably continue a balancing policy, but he will send a political signal to Ukraine that such sabotage is inadmissible, he surmised. "Security measures will be tightened, and an investigation into this incident with the involvement of Hungarian colleagues may be launched," the political scientist believes.
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