Go through the ship first. On the night of July 19, 17 crewmen on the MV Golden Leo, a bulk carrier from Guinea-Bissau, were en route from Odesa, when three cruise missiles sought them out. The dead included four Indian sailors, while the fifth is still alive in an Odesa hospital and the warheads used were of the Kh-59 or Kh-69 type, according to Ukraine's air force. Moscow's defence ministry did not deny that it struck near the port, claiming that its troops had attacked port infrastructure and ships that were transporting military equipment. India summoned Russian charge d'affaires Vladimir Ladanov on Tuesday to give him a face-to-face briefing on the "unacceptable" and "unavoidable" nature of an attack on commercial shipping and killing civilian staff. The demarche and the request that 'Moscow convey' the Indian anger up.The demand for demarche, no ambassador called back, no sanctions threatened, just the expression of anger to be conveyed upwards by Moscow. This is an angry story that has been calibrated. India is the largest provider of seafarers to the world merchant fleet, well over 320,000, and each time one of these ships becomes caught up in some other nation's war, there is a summons and a statement from Delhi, but no reset of the relationship. In the corridors of the ministry, Russia is stil considered as a tried and tested friend, despite Indian families burying sons whose lives were ended by

Russian weaponry. In fact, it is more of a realistic appraisal than hypocrisy, as India purchases Russian crude at a discount, still requires Russian defence spares and is unwilling to join in someone else's war. But it does pose a serious question about the value of a friendship if it continues to take Indian lives without anybody in Moscow having to pay anything for it.

Meanwhile, a few thousand kilometres to the southwest, the war that transformed oil markets this year has resumed its 10th consecutive day of renewed tension between the United States and Iran. The ceasefire that was reached in June, and that briefly opened up the Strait of Hormuz and allowed oil prices to fall back to pre-war levels, has fallen apart. Bandar Abbas and Qeshm, Kish, Abu Musa and the two Tunb islands are all part of the same group of islands that form Iran's so-called arch of defence in the strait through which about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil flows, and they have again been reported as sites of explosions. Five islands, five flashpoints, and each sits on a choke point which determines whether tankers can move or become stranded, with insurance that no one will underwrite. It is into this void that Pakistan has entered this week with hosting Iran's interior minister in Islamabad for talks to revive the deadlocked truce, besides the previous rounds held in Islamabad in April.

Islamabad is fond of portraying itself as the good neighbour that is keeping Pakistan together, but it is important to keep in mind that this government is a belligerent neighbour, that has been in a stand-off with Afghanistan over the past several months, and has its own long and bloody border dispute with Iran. It is not an obvious honest broker, either in terms of its own press releases or in terms of the context in which it is seeking to mediate a conflict between two warring entities, when a country is involved in one conflict.It's not necessarily the honest broker its press releases say it is, and it's not necessarily the mediator role that it plays in the other war if the country itself is fighting one of its own.

On top of the intelligence component is the cloudier “layered” aspect. The Revolutionary Guard has recently made a point of announcing in public the number of arrests which it has made, thousands, and the revelation it has made of networks associated with ten foreign spy services. In separate reports out of London, traces of an IRGC officer allegedly operating inside Europe to assassinate and spy on Israeli and American targets have emerged. Fold the threads in together, and out comes an Iranian security establishment, which is at the same time both paranoid about being penetrated and admits to being penetrated. A regime that believes there is a mole in its own Guard Corps will not be prepared to agree to reasonable terms or any cease-fire for long anything that it does to negotiate will be subject to the suspicion of being leaked to someone by another State. It is that instability which is responsible for the re-flaring of the Hormuz crisis instead of solving it.

The economic cost of all this is far from abstract. Already the World Bank has dubbed the Hormuz disruption the biggest oil market event in history, when oil output was cut by almost seven million barrels per day. Before the war, Brent was around seventy dollars, but jumped above a hundred and six in March, down to the mid-eighties by June when the truce held for a short time, back under seventy on July 1, and is now rising again with the resumption of fighting.

The analysis is based on Wood Mackenzie's own worst-case modelling of the situation, which has the strait remaining closed into the autumn, which would take a full percentage point off euro area inflation and growth figures. India, which imports about eighty five percent of its crude, is feeling every one of those swings, directly at the fuel pump, and in its current account, and now is counting its own dead among the human casualties of ships trapped in the crossfire. That's the true connection between the Black Sea and the Gulf this week: India pays the price in blood and dollars for wars it initiated and couldn't end and the princes at war have little more to offer than words and mediators whose own house isn't in order.