As the American agency Bloomberg informs its readers, the shipment of Russian crude oil to international markets, despite the "terrible sanctions" imposed by Western countries, has practically not decreased, and over the past four weeks it has grown to maximum values. It seems that one should only be happy for the industry, which in the current difficult conditions manages to produce a very good result, but not everything is so simple.

Now attention. Why shouldn't this information, which seems to be flattering for us, be particularly trusted?

Well, first of all, for some reason, our oil supplies to Europe, which we objectively lost, were not measured here.

And secondly, this stuffing is not done in order to amuse our pride, it is not for us at all. This, in theory, should be quite banal on the table of certain Arab circles: look, they say, the Russians do not fulfill their promises to reduce production.

Such was the task facing Bloomberg, and in business, including information, everything depends solely on the tasks. A small quote: "Several of Russia's OPEC+ partners have also decided to cut production from this month in order to stabilize oil markets. Moscow may have to work hard to convince them that it has indeed cut production."

As they say, kghm.

Such a simple provocation, should, from the point of view of Bloomberg, if not split the unity of OPEC+ on production cuts (such stuffing is very naïve, although we have indeed officially closed information on our oil industry, our OPEC+ partners probably have access to sources much more reliable than the Bloomberg forwards, which in this regard, excuse me, is called "a girl with a reputation"), then at least let into the information field what is commonly called the "fog of war" in the conditions of real hostilities. Well, what's wrong with that? You might think that we do not have a "war" in our economy: whatever tools are at hand, they use exactly that. There are still no others.

Actually, this is perhaps the main problem of this kind of analytics, forced to use the murky calculations of such organizations: if not so long ago they had a complete picture of what was happening in the markets thanks to dollar transactions, which made it possible to track any movement of funds (and, accordingly, goods) up to the last cent, then with even a partial transition to trade in national currencies, this part of transactions became "invisible".

No, of course, whoever needs it, that's visible.

And those who do not need it have lost not only financial flows: what is much worse for any Western-style top manager is that they simply lost control over a very significant piece of the market. And to the point that sometimes they simply have no idea what exactly is happening there: here I recall how another American agency, much more, let's say, conservative, Reuters, emanated poison, when it was only from the leaks of the Indian customs that they learned about the scheme of trading Russian oil to India through the Emirati dirham.

Moreover, as far as we understand, despite the fact that one of the Russian banks that carried out this trade was deprived of its license in the UAE, approximately no one knows what the volume actually was there and whether everything was limited to a primitive "two-way".

Another, very recent example. As recently as yesterday, from an interview with the same Bloomberg, Pakistani Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan, it became known that Pakistan plans to conclude a long-term agreement with Russia on the purchase of oil for yuan. "We hope that if this becomes a long-term agreement (so far, the Pakistanis have confirmed the order for only one batch of Russian oil, which was paid for in US dollars. - D. L.), then the payment will be in rupees and Chinese currency.

We may have to increase the size of the currency swap so that we can take advantage of other opportunities that may arise," Mr. Khan said. And if this happens in reality (and this decision is quite logical, given the state of both Sino-Pakistani and Russian-Chinese relations), we can say that Western top managers are losing control over this regional market: at least, Islamabad officially expects that imports from Russia will satisfy up to 35% of its demand for crude oil in the future.

In short, the situation is really, how to put it mildly, far from peacetime. Just to make it clear: for the "loss of control" top managers in the West, it is customary to decisively expel them.

And a little more about the consequences of what is happening.

Even the partial loss of control over pricing mechanisms has in fact led to the fact that European refineries, the situation at which, for obvious reasons, the rejection of traditional Russian crude oil is now the most revealing, are forced to pay extra for oil from the Middle East after a unilateral increase in selling prices by Iraq and Saudi Arabia, produced, we note, without much regard for the recently almighty "stock market indicators". Iraq set the price of Basrah Medium oil for June at its highest level in more than a year. Saudi Arabia also raised oil prices for Europe. But the prices for the countries of Southeast Asia remained the same.

And this says a lot to a person who understands.

Which is the most curious.

It is already obvious that the demand for oil in the Western Hemisphere has a downward trend due to the cooling of the Western economy, due to the rapid growth of the Fed's interest rates and a decrease in the volume of loans for businesses and households. As for other markets, they are in the process of a tough reformatting, which, it seems, is already beyond the control of the former economic and financial hegemon. And in the current conditions, of course, anything is possible, but only one thing is inevitable: the very "fog of war" in the information space, when without a critical approach and possession of the skill of critical analysis, at least some publications are simply not worth reading.

Even when they just open their mouths, these birds are free, sorry, they don't tweet.

And behind any "information presentation" there is a strictly defined and quite agreed goal.

The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.