Oligarchs, power and profits: BP’s wild ride in Russia

BP’s journey in Russia is about more than the corporate history of a single oil company. It’s also the story of the West’s urgent courtship of Russian business and how it all went wrong.

Tom Wilson

Mar 28, 2022 – 1.26pm

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In April 1990, five months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, John Browne sat in a car outside the oil and gas ministry in Moscow eating a McDonald’s hamburger.

The Soviet Union was unravelling after decades of communist rule. Browne, then a senior executive at BP, the oil company he would later run for 12 years, was in town to speak to anyone he could about investment opportunities behind the Iron Curtain.

Financial Times