Belarus has just bought two cargoes of Johan Sverdrup , the recently commissioned Norwegian oilfield and is in talks with several oil-producing countries from the Soviet Union to ramp up crude imports in the upcoming weeks. This in and of itself might not seem such a big thing yet considering that Belarus in the past years was 100 percent reliant on Russian crude (and has barely purchased any in 2020), it marks an unexpected escalation of what initially seemed to a technical issue, a transit fee discrepancy, that should have been sorted on a professional level, without the involvement of politics. Instead, the undeclared war between Belarus and Russia is now upending traditional lines of supply and wreaking havoc in the two states. Let’s start with the chronology first. The roots of the conflict are to be traced back to the inability of the two sides to settle on […]