What a difference a half year makes. Last January, then-Russian deputy prime minister and Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin was a portrait of confidence, kicking off the new year with blockbuster deals with international partners that seemed to place the company as a new market leader, while placating investors’ fears of corporate raiding in the Russian market. Six months later, both the BP deal and a recently planned joint venture with Chevron have fallen apart, and Sechin has been removed from Rosneft’s board, part of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s mandate to clear state company boards of government officials who are in charge of regulating the same sectors. The most shocking headline came on Friday, when Arkady Dvorkovich said that Rosneft might not even be a state-controlled company for much longer, as the government considers reducing its stake in the oil company to below 50%.

A post-mortem of the BP fiasco by Steve LeVine reveals miscues on both sides. From the outset the deal was hamstrung by the Russian consortium AAR, who own a 50-percent stake in the joint venture TNK-BP, and who blocked the deal with Rosneft in European courts. Amusingly, BP was first cornered into the TNK-BP deal with the understanding that partnering locally would protect them from corporate raiding, a lesson they learned the hard way when their future partners used Russia’s weak courts to seize BP’s investment in Sidanko. Fast forward to the attempted Rosneft share swap, and BP’s attempts to buy out AAR have since failed. The saga’s downward spiral recently culminated in a failed bluff worthy of a late night poker tournament, in which BP lawyers trying to extricate the company from the stranglehold of AAR claimed BP could bypass an exclusivity agreement if even “one share of [BP’s] 50 per cent stake” were sold.