If you ask who emerged as a loser in Islamabad, the answer is quite clear. After more than 21 hours of face-to-face talks, the most serious negotiations between the US and Iran since the start of the war on February 28, Vice President JD Vance departed without any deal, having announced a blockade imposed by his president during the ongoing war, which entered into its most perilous stage. And for Iran, the answer is equally clear; so is it for the rest of the world, which saw oil markets on the brink of catastrophe again.

But that framing obscures something important. In some part of Moscow, Putin’s finance department will be keeping track of oil money that has more than doubled in one month's time, with Russian mineral extraction tax on crude production soaring from 327 billion roubles to an estimated 700 billion roubles ($9 billion) in April, compared with March, as Reuters has estimated. In Beijing, meanwhile, there will be someone calculating how missile defenses have moved from South Korea to the Gulf region, how a quick-response Marine team has moved out of Japan, and how the summit meeting between Trump and Xi (planned in May) is being held against the backdrop of US overreach, which couldn’t be any better for China.

Who needed Islamabad to fail?

What I am about to demonstrate here has been under the radar, surprisingly. Let us get to the main point, who won and who lost (from the bigger picture):

Before the outbreak of hostilities in February 2026, Russia's oil export earnings had dropped to the lowest level in the post-Ukraine invasion period at $9.5 billion per month due to Ukrainian drone attacks, which caused a reduction in physical exports up to 40%. The Russian economy recorded a fiscal deficit of 4.58 trillion roubles in the first quarter. The projected growth rate for Russian GDP by the IMF was estimated to be 0.8%. And then the bombs dropped on Tehran. The price of Brent crude climbed above $100 per barrel. The gap between the discount prices for Urals crude – the vehicle through which sanctions imposed by the West........

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