Russia's Rosneft to Develop Cooperation With Cuba in Oil Production

A Russian energy giant aims to cooperate with Cuba.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Russian oil giant Rosneft plans to develop cooperation with Cuba on expansion of oil supplies, production and upgrade of the Cienfuegos refinery, the company said on Saturday.

Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin held a working meeting with Cuban Minister of Energy and Mines, Alfredo Lopez, and Cuban Ambassador to Russia, Emilio Lozada Garcia earlier in the day.

"During the meeting, the parties discussed the expansion of the volume of supplies, joint production projects, as well as the prospects for cooperation in the modernization of the Cuban oil refinery Cienfuegos," Rosneft said in a statement.

The statement comes amid the deterioration of the US-Cuba relations, which were significantly boosted under the presidency of Barack Obama in 2014, marking the end of the decades-long US policy to isolate Havana. At the end of September, the US decided to pull out more than half of its diplomatic personnel from the embassy in Havana and suspended routine visa operations over an alleged "acoustic attack."

In the beginning of 2017, media reported citing a letter of the Russian deputy economy minister to the cabinet that Moscow is considering a possibility of increasing supplies of Russian oil and oil products to Cuba.

According to the Russia's Federal Customs Service, Russia supplied 17,100 tons of oil products to Cuba in 2010-2015, with total cost of $11.3 million. In January – November 2016, some 3,100 tons of oil products costing $740,000 were exported to Cuba.