The Office of Foreign Assets Control issued an amended Russia-related general license Wednesday — General License 131E, "Authorizing Certain Transactions for the Negotiation of and Entry Into Contingent Contracts for the Sale of Lukoil International GmbH and Related Maintenance Activities" — and did not touch General License 134B, the Russian-crude-and-petroleum waiver expiring May 16. [1] Sixteen days remain on the clock. The April 26 paper called the waiver the contradiction at the center of the Iran-energy story; fourteen days later, the contradiction has been preserved by an OFAC office that picked a different file to update.
The GL 131E issuance is the procedural artifact. It is the third Russia-related general license Treasury has touched in April — after GL 134B's April 17 issuance [2] and the April 14 amended Russia-related general licenses on a separate counter-narcotics docket — and it confirms the office is staffed, active, and willing to amend the Russia-sanctions architecture when the political calculus permits. What the office has not done in April is amend GL 134B itself. The crude-and-petroleum text issued April 17 is the operative authorization. May 16 is the expiry. No narrowing language has surfaced. No replacement has been drafted in public.
What the silence on GL 134B inside the noise of GL 131E concedes is the price-vs-war split the paper has tracked since the Bessent reversal held. Russia is a price policy. Iran is a war policy. The two coexist because they answer different questions, and the Lukoil license is a price question — the contingent-contract maintenance language attached to a divestment process the U.S. wants completed without disrupting the European-affiliate energy trade. The crude waiver is the larger price question. Treasury has chosen, for sixteen consecutive operating days, not to answer it.
The May 16 cliff is a Saturday. Whatever decision Treasury issues — extension, narrowing, or quiet expiration — will print before the close of business Friday May 15. Brent's curve has not yet priced any specific path. Energy traders have been told, in the most explicit way the OFAC docket can communicate, which barrels can move and which cannot. What they have not been told is what changes on May 17.
-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow