Continuity under Sanctions: Transactional Reconfiguration and the Reproduction of Russian Oil Exports

บทคัดย่อ

  Why do sanctions that increase transport, insurance, financial, and market-access costs not necessarily interrupt an energy-export system? Conventional indicators such as prices, revenues, and trade volumes identify economic damage but do not explain whether a constrained material-commercial function can be reproduced.
  This article distinguishes operational pressure, value compression, and functional interruption and examines Russian petroleum exports from December 2022 to 20 September 2026. Using structured event-configuration analysis, it traces constraint–response episodes affecting the recurring circuit of extraction, loading, transport, delivery, settlement, and renewed shipment. It develops the concept of transactional reconfiguration: the timely recombination of operational rights, accessible assets, guarantees, counterparties, jurisdictions, and settlement arrangements through which a constrained function is reproduced. Fiscal receipts are treated as downstream evidence of monetisation rather than as direct measures of physical continuity. The evidence demonstrates substantial operational pressure, periods of value compression, and interruption at particular nodes and corridors, but not sustained interruption of the aggregate export circuit. Continuity was state-enabled but relationally co-produced through Russian coordination and external acceptance by buyers, ports, insurers, banks, and intermediary jurisdictions. Node removal becomes system-level interruption only when no operationally sufficient substitute is constituted before the viable adjustment interval expires.