Russia's Oil and Gas Complex: Uncertainty in Development and a Changing Role in the Country's Economy

This paper aims at analyzing the state of the art in Russia's oil and gas industry, which is now in an uncertain situation due to the unpredictability of oil prices, the sanctions, the geopolitical instability, as well as the industry's changing role in the country's economy and in forming the federal budget. The paper demonstrates that the last year has seen considerable changes in the development of the oil and gas complex: greater oil prices are surprisingly accompanied by a greater uncertainty, as non-market mechanism are often applied to this industry on a global scale. If this problem is to be solved, innovative development in this industry becomes a must, which implies large-scale investments in the development of Russian-made equipment and technologies, the development of unconventional, residual, and hard-to-recover hydrocarbon reserves from the earlier developed areas. The Arctic shelf must be developed further. At the same time, emphasis has to be made on the socioeconomic development of the Arctic.