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At the end of the 19th century the great powers engaged in a scramble for Africa.

The Russians are constructing 15 new LNG supertankers, each with built-in ice-breaker capacity – to add to their existing fleet of 40 ice-breakers. With Yamal’s sister plant, Arctic LNG 2, due to come on stream in 2023, Russia aims to topple Qatar as the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas within less than a decade. France’s oil-giant Total and China’s National Petroleum Corporation each hold 20 per cent, while China’s state-controlled Silk Road Fund has a 9.9 per cent share. Yamal LNG was built by Novatek, Russia’s biggest privately owned gas-producer, with loans from state banks (£2.8bn), the Russian National Wealth Fund (£1.6bn) and, most significantly, £8.5bn from Chinese banks. He had just opened the £19bn Yamal liquefied natural gas plant. Only a few days earlier Putin had returned from the frozen wastes of Siberia, nearly 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle. A far more interesting story went largely unreported. The British and American media focused on Putin’s unsurprising announcement that he was going to run for re-election in 2018. On 14 December 2017 Vladimir Putin gave his annual end-of-year media conference, which lasted nearly four hours and was televised across Russia.