Top Russian producer Rosneft expects the share of hard-to-recover oil production to rise to 11 percent of its total crude output by 2020, from 7 percent this year. Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of state gas producer Gazprom, is raising its share of output of hard-to-recover oil by tapping more reserves at the Messoyakha project and other assets.

The Western sanctions have left Gazprom largely unaffected, including with respect to the execution and extension of existing contracts and the conclusion of new contracts for gas supplies with foreign parties, and have had little bearing on the Company's ongoing activities.

"With regard to the cooperation with Saudi Arabia, the dialogue between our two countries is developing in a tangible way, whether in the framework of a multi-party structure or on a bilateral level," Novak was quoted as saying.

However, in conjunction with both lower oil prices and international sanctions, Russia has recently experienced five consecutive quarters of decline in GDP, representing that country's deepest economic downturn since 2008-09.

Gazprom's Deputy Chief Executive Alexander Medvedev said the BG holdings could be included in an asset swap deal between Gazprom and Shell that was announced last year. He did not say what the BG holdings were or where they were located.

“We remain committed to our strategic investment in Rosneft,” Scott Dean, a company spokesman, said by e-mail, adding that BP complies with all relevant European and U.S. sanctions. “In the low oil-price environment, Rosneft continues to deliver solid operational and financial performance, demonstrating the resilience of its business model.”

“The US has sought to work with Europe to lessen Europe's dependence on Russian energy and, particularly, gas supplies to weaken Russian leverage to use that gas supply for political purposes and has enjoyed some success, and this has been a cooperative venture. Three administrations working in the same direction, many of the same assumptions and people.”

In addition to Vietnam, Rosneft also has oil-producing assets in Venezuela and Canada. It has exploration prospects in several other countries, including in Mozambique and the US in partnership with ExxonMobil.

“The economy has held up surprisingly well when you consider the stresses on it” that include Western sanctions preventing banks and oil companies from issuing debt and imposing bans on high-tech oil equipment purchases, said Christopher Miller, Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program at Yale ISS. “The reason is that government policies since 2008 have been relatively effective,” he said in a Feb. 18 presentation at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

LNG cannot reach every corner of Europe: there may be a lot of under-used capacity in import terminals in the Iberian peninsula but these are not useful for security of supply in mainland Europe except where they have reloading facilities. There is very little transport capacity overland into France.

In theory, the European Union is pursuing a single energy market, based on the needs of all 28 EU nations. It is also meant to be united against Russia as it seeks to defend the interests of Ukraine following Moscow's seizure of Crimea in March last year.

The Nord Stream II pipeline would stretch 1,200 kilometers across the Baltic Sea, from Vyborg on the Russian coast to Griefswald, Germany. Once completed, it would have the capacity to transport 27.5 billion cubic meters of gas directly to Germany, circumventing Ukraine and the Central and Eastern European states. Russia’s Gazprom would own 50% of the project, and France’s Engie, Austria’s OMV, Royal Dutch Shell, and Germany’s BASF and E.ON each would own a 10% share.

The additional volumes are roughly what Gazprom has been piping to the EU through Ukraine, raising concerns that the new route would allow Russia to strip Kiev of much of its remaining economic leverage and an important source of income.

Rosneft received advance payments for oil supplies worth more than $15bn in the third quarter — the first large-scale financing that the state-controlled Russian group has secured since western sanctions were imposed upon it.

The financing problems for the project stems from U.S.-led sanctions against Russia’s oil and natural gas sector over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2014. Also, in June the EU extended economic sanctions on Russia until January 3, in a move that media said at the time was “keeping up pressure on Moscow to help resolve the Ukraine conflict.”