Bill Perkins remembered a meeting in Kazakhstan with Russian oligarchs about 20 years ago, when the discussion turned to Vladimir Putin, who they said had one key goal: restoring the former Soviet Union.
Just wait, they said. Putin will position himself and seize the opportunity.
The horrors of war unfolding in Ukraine seem to have upheld that prediction, Perkins said.
The Brookhaven native worked four decades across multiple continents in the oil industry before retiring in Southwest Mississippi. Neither a Republican nor a Democrat, Perkins spoke to the local Republican Party last week at Cypress Landing outside Summit about his experiences and his insight into the politics of Eastern Europe and Asia.
A 1970 graduate of Brookhaven Academy with degrees in political science and marketing from Millsaps College and Ole Miss, Perkins’ first job out of college was working for an oil company in Denmark.
He’s worked and lived in many other places, including Scandinavia, Ireland, the U.K., Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Bangla-desh, Indonesia, Brazil and Singapore.
He lived in Kazakhstan for 12 years.
“When you produce oil in Central Asia, you’ve got to find a way to get it out,” Perkins said. “That meant going through Russia.”
When Perkins first arrived in Kazakhstan, Boris Yeltsin was the Russian president, and then Putin took over.
“We thought Putin would be a stabilizing factor, but we found out very quickly that he had his own agenda, and he wanted to put the Soviet Union back together again,” Perkins said. “The stripes on the cat won’t ever change.”
Perkins said he believes last summer’s failed evacuation of Afghanistan showed President Joe Biden was ill-equipped to respond to an invasion of Ukraine.
Perkins said he’s surprised at how well Ukrainian defenses have held against Russian forces.
“It says a lot for the Ukrainians to be that strong, to defy them, especially one of the major super powers on the planet,” he said. “They’ve been very effective in holding up the Russian military.”
The Russian response to the seemingly stalled invasion has been in the form of stepped-up attacks on civilian targets, including a maternity hospital and heavy shelling of the city of Mariupol, which Ukrainian officials on Monday refused to surrender to the Russians.
With the invasion of Ukraine not going the way Putin planned, the Russian leader “looks a little unhinged lately,” Perkins said.
“The Russian military is not what we thought it was, and it’s not what they thought it was, either. It’s very impressive that they held on for three weeks against what was supposed to be a superpower,” he said.
An isolated, cornered and desperate Putin is a threat to the world, Perkins said.
“This man’s got the button to 6,000 nuclear weapons and he’s got his back against the wall because this invasion didn’t go the way he thought it would,” he said. “Desperate people do desperate things and I really hope Putin doesn’t do something really scary at this point.”
Perkins, who lived in Hong Kong on four different occasions, said he believes China could follow Russia’s move in aggressively annexing disputed territory, particularly Taiwan, depending on how the response to Russia’s invasion plays out.
“It could happen. I hope it doesn’t happen,” Perkins said.
Meanwhile, with America no longer importing Russian oil and the value of the ruble plummeting, Perkins said China, which hasn’t condemned or sanctioned Russia for the invasion, stands to load up on Russian oil at fire sale prices.
As for the oil market, Perkins said prices were going up before Biden’s term began in 2021, but the president has since signed executive orders related to an energy policy of boosting renewable energy and fighting climate change — two things that usually run counter to the oil industry.
“Pipelines, oil production — they’re not getting anything approved,” Perkins said.
And with no more oil coming from the world’s No. 2 producer — Russia — supplies are dropping and prices are rising, he said.
It’ll take time for the market to stabilize, regardless of how things play out.
“Being in the oil business, you don’t just flip a switch and pick back up. Unfortunately, it’s going to take a little bit more time than that,” Perkins said.
Perkins said one of Putin’s reasons for invading Ukraine is his insistence that it was never really a sovereign nation to begin with.
“They were always getting invaded,” he said, noting a long history of invaders including the Austrian Empire, Hungarian Empire, the Russians and others.
He said that kind of history has led to a lot of national pride in Ukraine.
Perkins also recalled unrest that took place in Kazakhstan not long before Russia invaded Ukraine.
“Several months ago, they had riots against the government,” he said, adding that Putin sent in commandos to stabilize the situation. “Everybody I know who still lives there said that was Putin all along. He caused unrest to send in these groups.”
