Vladimir Putin did not start this war. He didn’t fund it, plan it, lobby for it, or ask for it. He didn’t need to. He just woke up on the morning of March 1, 2026, turned on the television, watched the Strait of Hormuz go dark, and had what can only be described as the best week of his presidency. Then the week after that was even better. Then the week after that.
Let’s start with the oil, because the oil is staggering. Western sanctions had spent the better part of four years slowly, painfully squeezing Russia’s energy revenues — the lifeblood of Putin’s war economy. By January 2026, it was working. Russia’s fossil fuel revenues had fallen to $501 million a day, their lowest level since the pandemic. Ukraine was striking Russian refineries. The ruble was under pressure. Moscow had just posted a record budget deficit of 8.3 trillion rubles. The Kremlin’s 2026 budget required Urals crude to trade at roughly $59 a barrel just to break even; in late 2025 it was trading well below that, and Russia was being forced to sell at a discount of $10 to $13 a barrel to compensate buyers for the sanctions risk of doing business with Moscow. The sanctions regime was not perfect. But it was working.
Then the United States bombed Iran. Within two weeks, Russia was earning $554 million a day. Between March 1 and March 15, Moscow collected $8.3 billion in fossil fuel export revenue — as Brent crude surged past $100 a barrel for the first time in years, the Strait of Hormuz ground to a halt, and the discount Russia had been eating to move its oil quietly reversed into a premium. Before the war, Russia was selling at a 10 to 20 percent discount to global benchmarks. By mid-March, per analysts at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, that discount had vanished entirely. Russia was selling its oil at essentially the same price as Brent crude. The sanctions regime that took four years to build was functionally suspended in a fortnight, not because anyone dismantled it, but because Donald Trump started a war that made Russian oil indispensable.
And then the Trump administration made it official. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a 30-day waiver allowing Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil stranded at sea — oil that had been sitting without buyers specifically because of the sanctions architecture designed to strangle Putin’s war chest. Bessent acknowledged, when pressed, that Russia would benefit from the waiver. He called it "unfortunate." India is the second-largest buyer of Russian fossil fuels on earth. Russian crude shipments to India, which had fallen 19 percent in February as sanctions pressure mounted, rebounded immediately. Kpler analyst Sumit Ritolia projected Russian shipments to India would reach between 2 and 2.2 million barrels a day in March — a reversal that Luke Wickenden, a Europe-Russia energy and sanctions analyst at CREA, told CBS News was "quickly becoming a lifeline for Russia." Zelenskyy said it plainly: lifting sanctions "will only help Russia." He said Russian intelligence had reported a deficit of more than $100 billion in Russia’s 2026 budget before the Iran war began. That deficit is now being filled, barrel by barrel, with oil the United States just made easier to sell.
Economists at the Kyiv School of Economics modeled three scenarios based on how long the war lasts. In the shortest scenario — a conflict ending by mid-April — Russia earns an additional $84 billion beyond pre-war projections. In a prolonged conflict running through the end of May, with oil spiking to $140 a barrel, Russia earns an additional $161 billion. In the worst-case scenario, the additional windfall to the Kremlin reaches $250 billion. That number — $250 billion — exceeds the entire scale of Western military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022. The United States and its allies spent four years and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to limit Putin’s ability to finance his war against Ukraine. One war of choice in the Middle East is in the process of undoing it.
Putin himself understood the assignment immediately. At a meeting with Russia’s top energy producers and policymakers on March 3, five days into the war, he told them it was "important for Russian energy companies to make use of the current moment." He suggested that the European Union — which had spent two years charting a deliberate course away from dependence on Russian energy — would now reconsider "long-term, stable cooperation" with Moscow. He was not wrong. European leaders, watching oil prices blow past $100 a barrel and global supply chains buckle, began fielding quiet questions about whether the continent had moved too fast away from Russian gas. Putin’s special representative for economic affairs, Kirill Dmitriev, went further: "Oil over $100 — and Russia’s voice in the global economy and geopolitics is becoming even louder," he posted on social media. "Russia is a systemically important energy supplier, without which neither global stability nor a sustainable model for global growth are possible." Dmitriev, apparently feeling expansive, suggested oil might eventually reach $200 a barrel. He was gloating. He had earned the right.
The European Council president, António Costa, said it out loud in a speech to EU ambassadors in Brussels on March 4: "So far, there is only one winner in this war — Russia. It gains new resources to finance its war against Ukraine as energy prices rise. It profits from the diversion of military capabilities." That last part — the diversion of military capabilities — is the second catastrophe, and it is one that will outlast the price of oil.
The Patriot missile system is Ukraine’s backbone defense against Russian ballistic missiles — the Iskanders and Kinzhals that Russia has been firing at Ukrainian cities, power grids, and water infrastructure in escalating waves. There is no Western system widely deployed in Ukraine that provides comparable anti-ballistic capability. Before the Iran war began, Washington was already reluctant to part with additional Patriot launchers and interceptor stocks; the Heritage Foundation had found in January that the initial US stockpile of munitions would run out within 25 days of a high-intensity conflict with a near-peer adversary, and Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, had already paused weapons shipments to Ukraine in July 2025 specifically to preserve stockpiles for a potential future conflict with China.
Then Iran fired more than 2,100 drones and at least 688 ballistic missiles in three weeks of war. Bloomberg’s analysis found that the US and its allies have already fired more than 1,000 PAC-3 interceptor missiles in response — at roughly $3 million each. Zelenskyy told the world that more US-made Patriot defense systems were used in the first three days of the Iran war than Ukraine had received in total since 2022. Every interceptor fired over Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, or a US base in Qatar is one fewer available to intercept the next Russian ballistic barrage against Kharkiv or Odesa. The Foreign Policy Research Institute put it without diplomatic cushion: "Every Patriot battery committed to defending Gulf cities is a battery that cannot be redeployed to protect Odesa or Kharkiv from Russian salvos."
Russia, meanwhile, produces 60 to 70 Iskander-M ballistic missiles per month, plus Kinzhals, plus modified S-300 and S-400 missiles it fires in ground-attack roles, plus a new weapon — the Izdelie-30 — with a warhead 300 kilograms heavier than a standard Iskander. It does not rely on Iran for its drone supply anymore; Russia has been manufacturing its own Shahed derivatives domestically for over a year, in quantities that do not depend on whatever is happening in Tehran. The Iran war does not reduce Russia’s offensive capability against Ukraine by a single missile. It reduces Ukraine’s ability to stop them.
And then there is the gift of attention. The Russia-Ukraine war entered its fifth year on February 24, four days before the US struck Iran. Peace negotiations — such as they were — had already stalled, with Moscow demanding Ukraine cede the Kyiv-controlled portion of Donetsk and Washington growing visibly impatient with the lack of progress. The Iran war did not merely pause those negotiations. It ended them for the foreseeable future. Every White House senior staff meeting that now begins with Iran is a meeting that does not begin with Ukraine. Every congressional hearing about the Middle East is a hearing that is not about Russian violations of the ceasefire framework. Every press briefing where Hegseth talks about Operation Epic Fury is a briefing where no one is asking about Kursk, or Zaporizhzhia, or the 30 ballistic missiles Russia fired at Ukrainian cities last Tuesday night — the highest-intensity overnight salvo in four years of war.
Ivan Tyshkevych, a Ukrainian analyst, described the dynamic with surgical precision: Russia gets several weeks to come up with a new agenda for Trump, while Washington’s attention is consumed elsewhere. "No one wants to say ‘no’ first but tries to create conditions for the opponent to loudly say ‘no’ and slam the door loudly," he told Al Jazeera. In translation: Russia is running out the clock on Ukraine while the United States runs its war in Iran, and the clock is the one thing Ukraine cannot afford to lose.
James Henderson at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies put the financial picture plainly: the oil windfall means more money will be available to Russia, and "by default, more money will be available for spending on the military. That is definitely an unfortunate consequence." Ian Bremmer, the geopolitical analyst, told CBS News that the boost to Russia’s state coffers will give the Kremlin greater financial flexibility as it wages its war. He acknowledged that over a million Russian soldiers have become casualties in four years of fighting and it has not slowed Putin down. More money does not make Putin more willing to take casualties. It makes him more able to absorb them.
In March 2025, Putin offered to mediate US-Iranian negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program. Three months later, when the US and Israel struck Iran in the first 12-day war, he offered again. Washington ignored him both times. He did not appear to take it personally. He simply waited. And on February 28, 2026, without lifting a finger, without spending a ruble, without risking a single Russian soldier, Vladimir Putin got everything he’d been waiting for: oil above $100, sanctions functionally suspended, Patriot missiles burning in the Gulf that were supposed to go to Kyiv, Western attention consumed by a fire he didn’t start, and a peace process for Ukraine in the deep freeze.
The man Trump spent 2024 promising to stop within 24 hours of taking office is having the best year of his presidency.
Trump has not mentioned Ukraine in a public statement in eleven days.
**Next in the Obliterated series: America went to its allies hat in hand after starting a war without telling them. Most of them said no. Then Trump called them cowards and threatened to leave NATO. Here’s what NATO actually is — and what it isn’t. (Part Five: The Alliance)
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