SAUDI-RUSSIA COLLUSION IS DRIVING UP GAS PRICES — AND WORSENING UKRAINE CRISIS
A spat between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Biden is pushing gas prices ever higher. It started under Obama. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2018 AS RUSSIA ORDERED troops into Ukraine on Monday, gas prices soared to their highest levels in over seven years. While the media focuses on the conflict in Ukraine, a major cause of the gas price spike has gone overlooked: Moscow’s partnership with Saudi Arabia has grown dramatically in recent years, granting the two largest oil producers in the world the unprecedented ability to collude in oil export decisions. The desert kingdom’s relationship with the U.S. has chilled in the meantime, as demonstrated earlier this month, when President Joe Biden pleaded with the Saudis to increase oil production — a move that would not only have helped to alleviate rising inflation and gas prices, but also reduced Russia’s extravagant pr...