BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images(MOSCOW) — Russian officials and foreign policy thinkers seem to see Donald Trump’s appointment of Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil chairman and CEO, to be the next secretary of state as a welcome surprise. Some are hailing it as chance to put an end to U.S. sanctions on Russia.
While Russian officials have been more measured in their praise, many foreign policy analysts in the country, including those close to the Kremlin, have responded to Tillerson’s appointment as a sign Trump’s administration is planning a major reset of Russia-U.S. relations, which have fallen to post-Cold War lows.
It’s “a sort of Christmas gift from the American people to the Russian people,” Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political commentator told the Wall Street Journal.
The satisfaction is due in part to Tillerson’s long and profitable interactions with Russia as CEO of ExxonMobil, which saw him sign vast oil deals in the country and made him a very familiar face among the Kremlin elite, including to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Putin has personally awarded Tillerson the Order of Friendship, a state honor. That decoration reflected Exxon’s determined work under Tillerson to do highly valuable business with Russia’s state top oil companies. Tillerson has had unusually close contact with Putin, regularly attending Putin’s pet project, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, where he has appeared on a panel with the Russian president.
“Russian representatives, and not only the president, have very good working relations with this person,” Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin aide told Interfax. “He is a solid and very professional person,” Ushakov said.
But Tillerson may soon be in the position of helping to lift economic sanctions on Russia that would earn his former company potentially billions of dollars.
In 2011, Tillerson signed a strategic partnership deal with Russia’s oil giant, Rosneft, then owned 75 percent by the government and headed by Putin’s close ally and ex-KGB colleague, Igor Sechin. Like his company, Sechin is currently under sanctions. Putin has suggested the investment in those projects could one day reach a massive $500 billion. Another project allows ExxonMobil to work on massive Arctic containing 750 million barrels of oil.
But in 2014, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, targeting Putin’s inner circle and the country’s banking and energy sectors. The sanctions meant some of ExxonMobil’s most high-value projects were frozen.
That now seems a distinct possibility. As head of ExxonMobil, Tillerson publicly opposed the U.S. sanctions, saying the company considered them ineffective and unnecessarily damaging to its business.
“We’ll await a time in which the sanctions environment changes or the sanctions requirements change,” Tillerson told an oil conference in Houston in 2015. Trump himself has said that the sanctions are “something we’ll be looking at.”
The Kremlin, which has been maneuvering heavily to have the sanctions lifted, has played down its excitement at Tillerson’s appointment. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Russia did not “cherish any dreams” that it would transform relations.
But the possibility that Tillerson could now be involved in lifting the sanctions that would unlock huge gains for Exxon-Mobil has raised questions around a possible conflict of interest. Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow under President Obama, wrote on Twitter:
Tillerson, who worked for over forty years at ExxonMobil, earlier this year reportedly owned $218 million in company stock with a roughly $70 million pension plan. He was due to retire next year, according to The New York Times.
Trump himself has praised Tillerson’s deal-making in Russia. In an interview with Fox News on Sunday Trump said, “To me, a great advantage is he knows many of the players and he knows them well.”
“He does massive deals in Russia,” Trump added. “He does massive deals, not for himself, for the company.”
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