ST. PETERSBURG, June 6 -- The argument Igor Sechin makes every June at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum has grown more pointed with each passing year of sanctions, but on Saturday it arrived with new urgency. The Strait of Hormuz is in crisis, OPEC+ is navigating an accelerated production ramp-up, and Western governments have spent three years trying to price Russian crude out of the market. None of it, the Rosneft chief executive said, has worked.

"Russia cannot be excluded from global supply chains," Sechin told the SPIEF energy panel on the final day of the forum. The economic partnership Russia has built with China and India, he said, "guarantees stable supplies to both of these countries" regardless of how conditions ...