2 years into the illegal war, Russia has seen a reduction in it’s oil output and oil shipments, but oil revenue continues to rise. This thread explains why this is happening, and what needs to be done to reduce oil revenue which funds the genocidal war in Ukraine.
Crude Oil Shipments Update
Russian crude oil exports to Europe and Turkey have nose-dived in 2024. A year ago in January 2023, crude oil shipments 4 week average was around 1.5 million barrels per day. Crude shipments to Northern Europe (1.2 million bpd in January 2022, to zero by the end of 2022) and Mediterranean (also ended by the end of 2022) have dried up, while crude oil shipments via the Black Sea ground to a halt in February 2024 - leaving Turkey as the main destination for Russian crude oil shipments increasing it’s Russian crude oil shipments from 100,000 bpd to 400,000 bpd by 2024.
Shipments to Asia:
At the start of 2022, Russia was exporting 1.2 million bpd by seaborne transport, with the biggest customer being China. The biggest increase however, came from India, who increased orders to over 3.5 million bpd in May 2023. Over the past year there has been a decrease in sales to these countries. Analysis of total seaborne shipments show that in March 2024, Russia shipped 2.8 million bdp in total, and the level of oil to India has halved.
Reuters reported in February 2024, “Imports from Russia declined 4.2% to 1.3 million barrels per day (bpd), according to LSEG data. Data from ship tracking agency Vortexa showed a slide of 9% to 1.2 million bpd.
CREA (Energy and clean http://air.org) published it’s latest 2024 report claiming crude oil accounted for 82% (EUR 1.6 bn) of India’s total fossil fuel imports from Russia. Oil products accounted for 11% (EUR 0.2 bn), and coal accounted for 7% (EUR 0.14 bn) of their total imports in February.
India’s import volumes of Russian crude oil decreased by 7%, subsequently also reducing its total imports by 7%. India’s crude oil imports from Russia fell for a third consecutive month, impacted by ongoing issues with payments and The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions.
While some sanctioned vessels started delivering Sokol shipments stranded at sea, they were mostly diverted to China.
The narrowing of Russian crude discounts versus Middle Eastern crude, recent U.S. sanctions on shipowners carrying Russian crude above the price cap and rising tanker premiums as a result of the Red Sea attacks have made Russian crude less attractive for Indian refiners in recent months," said Serena Huang, Vortexa's head of APAC analysis. India's imports of Russian crude could fall further in the coming months”, she added.
China and India are the only two big buyers of Russia seaborne oil left in the market for Russia. The 1 million bpd reduction is sales to India corresponds to the 1 million bpd cuts in Russian production they committed to with OPEC+. (Russia and Saudi hatched a plan in April 2023 to cut 500,000 bpd from Russian oil output to raise the price of oil, and last month Russia agreed to increase that 500k cut up to 1 million bpd reduction).
It could be argued that Russia agreed to these cuts, not in the interests of OPEC+, but because India’s reduction in purchases has resulted in Russia not having the storage capacity for the oil that India now longer wants to buy.
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Europe is still funding Russia’s war machine. IT HAS TO STOP
