“We follow the law,” said Alan Jeffers, an Exxon Mobil spokesman. “If a law says that a U.S. corporation is not allowed to participate in activities in a particular jurisdiction, that’s what we do.”
The sanctions are intended to put economic pressure on Russia for its lethal intervention in eastern Ukraine, with the aim of forcing the Russian leadership to change course.
Still, Mr. Tillerson has made his criticism of the American policy clear.
At Exxon’s 2014 annual meeting, Mr. Tillerson said: “We do not support sanctions, generally, because we don’t find them to be effective unless they are very well implemented comprehensibly, and that’s a very hard thing to do. So we always encourage the people who are making those decisions to consider the very broad collateral damage of who are they really harming.”
Then, during a question-and-answer period at a Houston conference in early 2015, Mr. Tillerson noted his company looked forward to the sanctions’ being lifted.
“We’ll await a time in which the sanctions environment changes or the sanctions requirements change,” he said of blocked Exxon Mobil projects.
Mr. Tillerson’s approach in Russia tracks what Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer for the Russian tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, who had been jailed, described as “the geopolitics of signaling” to the Kremlin, a skill of survival and success for Western oil executives in Russia.
“Exxon has been willing to engage in practices that make it a first-round contender for new Russian assets,” Mr. Amsterdam said. “The way you do that is coming as close to the line as humanely possible to support the Russians” without breaking the law.
Western sanctions were first enacted on Russia in March 2014 in response to the Russian annexation of Crimea. Then the United States and its allies, including the Netherlands, implicated Russia in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine that July. All on board were killed, including 193 Dutch people heading to Asia for vacations and work, flying for a just few moments over a war zone.
That prompted tighter sanctions. A month later, Russian tanks entered eastern Ukraine, turning the tide against the forces of the American-backed Ukrainian central government. Today, about 300 American soldiers rotate through Ukraine as trainers.
After the Russian incursion in 2014, the United States prohibited the transfer of advanced offshore and shale oil technology to Russia. The American government announced on Sept. 12 that year that Exxon was to halt all offshore drilling assistance to Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, by Sept. 26.
But Exxon Mobil’s high-tech rig was already drilling in the Kara Sea, in an unfinished $ 700 million project that had yet to find oil. It would be worthless if not completed.
Russian executives then told Exxon Mobil that Russia’s security services would fly in a Russian crew — in essence seize the rig — if Exxon Mobil complied with the American law and left without completing the well, according to an oil company executive who had visited the rig in the Arctic.
Exxon relayed the threat to the American government, and the Treasury Department capitulated, granting an extension that stretched the window to work until Oct. 10. In a statement in 2014, the Russian state oil company denied conveying such a threat to Mr. Tillerson’s company.
With the extension in hand, Exxon Mobil discovered a major field with about 750 million barrels of new oil for Russia a few weeks later. Igor I. Sechin, the chief executive of the Russian state oil company, called the newly discovered oil field Pobeda — Russian for victory.
It is one of the Arctic developments that Exxon Mobil has rights to work on should the sanctions be lifted.
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