Driving US shale out of the market is a big part of the Saudi’s gambit. And the time horizon of their strategy is longer-term than other players like Russia, worried about its year-to-year budget, or Trump, worried about today’s price. The goal is to halt new investment in high cost fields in the US. They’ve done this before and the results usually don’t reveal themselves for many years, as today’s oil extraction is enabled by investment in the years prior.

Russia was once well-equipped to wait out a period of low prices in return for future market power. That is until Putin decided to start a very costly war, and finance it with the sovereign wealth fund. The liquid assets in the fund, set aside to insure against exactly this kind of price shock, were spent on shells and tanks instead. Still, Russia has very low public debt/GDP, and domestic borrowing and tax increases could support the budget in the short to medium term. So I wouldn’t count on this forcing them to negotiate just yet.