KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 7 — In less than a year, Ukraine’s drone campaign has turned Russia’s oil empire inward. Once a symbol of industrial invincibility, the world’s third-largest refining system now staggers under attrition — more than half of Russia’s 38 refineries have been hit, and analysts estimate that up to 12 per cent of total refining capacity has been knocked offline at various points. The Kremlin’s response was drastic — a six-month ban on gasoline exports to quell domestic shortages, sacrificing billions in revenue for political calm.

It was the unthinkable made real — an oil superpower suddenly fuel-poor. Each repair exposed new weaknesses; each government decree deepened dependence. What began as tactical warfare against infrastructure has become a test of institutions — revealing the quiet decay of a petrostate built on control rather than adaptability.

For Southeast Asia, this is not a distant European parable. It is a mirror — a glimpse of how energy insecurity, once imagined as a Northern crisis, could just as easily define Asean’s future if complacency persists.

Quantifying Asean’s vulnerability

The numbers tell their own story. Fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — still supply nearly 80 per cent of Asean’s primary energy demand. Malaysia remains an exporter, but its neighbours are far more exposed: Thailand and the Philippines import over 90 per cent of their crude oil, while Indonesia and Vietnam’s growing demand is steadily outpacing domestic supply.

Collectively, Asean’s energy import bill exceeds US$150 billion (RM626 billion) annually, a figure that swells whenever global prices spike — as in 2022, when oil shocks drained foreign reserves and widened fiscal deficits across the region. Each surge in Brent crude represents more than consumer pain — it’s capital flight on a regional scale, money that could have built power grids, financed innovation, or underwritten energy independence.

Energy wars and institutional fragility

Russia’s refinery crisis offers an unflinching lesson in structural fragility. Its vast network — designed in the Soviet era for volume, not flexibility — has proven repairable but brittle. Every attack and hurried restart erodes both steel and confidence.

To maintain order, Moscow imposed price controls, fuel quotas, and ad-hoc decrees, effectively nationalising risk and paralysing innovation. The system endures — but at the cost of agility. Stability, enforced by bureaucracy, is now indistinguishable from stagnation.

For Asean, the danger lies in a quieter form of the same disease. Malaysia and Indonesia each spend billions annually on fuel subsidies — often exceeding 1.5 per cent of GDP — locking public finances into a fossil cycle. Those funds, diverted from grid modernisation or renewables, create a growing annual investment gap of roughly US$70 billion against the US$100 billion per year needed for Asean to meet its clean-energy goals. In both Moscow and Manila, control masquerades as security; the result is deferred collapse.

Geopolitics in every pipeline

Energy today is not just traded — it is weaponised. Sanctions, insurance premiums, and drone strikes have become the new calculus of statecraft.

Malaysia, sitting astride the Strait of Malacca — the conduit for a third of the world’s crude oil trade — knows this intimately. Disruptions from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf eventually ripple through Kuala Lumpur’s ports and Singapore’s bunkering terminals. Energy neutrality is a fading illusion — Asean’s middle path must now be one of strategic agility, not passive non-alignment.

The war in Ukraine redrew more than frontlines; it redefined what energy sovereignty means. It showed that infrastructure without innovation is vulnerability waiting to be exposed.

Resilience through diversification

Diversification, then, is no longer a green aspiration but a geopolitical imperative. Malaysia’s plan to produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) by 2027 signals a pivot toward innovation, but resilience cannot be built in isolation.

The Asean Power Grid (APG) offers the most tangible path forward — a vision of shared resilience through interconnection. Yet progress has been halting: only eight cross-border links currently exist, with limited electricity trade. A fully realised APG could enable up to 20 per cent of regional power to flow across borders by 2035, turning national vulnerabilities into collective strength.

Vietnam’s 300 GW offshore wind potential, for instance, could one day power Singapore’s industrial grid or Thailand’s manufacturing zones — if the wires, trust, and political will align. In such a future, energy ceases to be a zero-sum game; it becomes the architecture of Asean’s shared sovereignty.

The financial logic of transition

Energy transition, ultimately, is a fiscal discipline. Fuel subsidies are political sugar — sweet, addictive, and corrosive. Every ringgit or baht spent holding down pump prices is capital denied to the grids, batteries, and renewables that would secure independence.

Redirected through green bonds, blended finance, and regional carbon markets, these same funds could attract the US$1 trillion in private capital now circling Asia’s transition sector. The lesson from Russia is unequivocal — when states consolidate control in the name of stability, they repel both innovation and investment. Resilience is not decreed — it is financed.

The quiet warning

The degradation of Russia’s oil system is not collapse in the cinematic sense; it is entropy — the slow rot of institutions unable to evolve. For Malaysia and Asean, it is a preview of what happens when policy comfort outpaces structural reform.

Energy security today demands reinvention — fewer subsidies, more integration; fewer silos, more trust; fewer decrees, more markets. The wells of the twentieth century are running dry — literally, institutionally, and ideologically.

In the wars of the twenty-first century, the victors will not be those with the deepest reserves, but those with the broadest resilience. And in that reckoning, Asean’s future will depend not on what it extracts, but on how swiftly it adapts.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.