Oil will find a hole: the embargo does not prevent the United States from using Russian fuel

Ivan Zubov

On Wednesday, June 1, Novye Izvestia published a version that, under the oil embargo, Russia will follow the Iranian path, starting to pump its oil to tankers of other countries on the high seas. It turned out that this is already happening, according to the publication of the influential American publication The Wall Street Journal, which is sounding the alarm about the ineffectiveness of anti-Russian oil sanctions. Despite the announcement of an embargo by Western countries, Russian oil still ends up in the United States. Oil traders carefully hide the fact that crude oil of Russian origin is already being used in diesel fuel, gasoline and other refined products. Fuel with impurities of Russian oil is delivered to the United States through the Suez Canal straight from Indian refineries, and they, in turn, buy oil from Russia. In addition, Russian oil is pumped from tanker to tanker off the coast of West Africa, and in the Mediterranean, and even in the Black Seas, so that after indicating a different origin of the cargo, it is delivered not only to India or China, but even to Europe itself, writes edition.

So far, oil traders have been good at hiding the origin of this raw material. Moreover, Russian oil coming to India is mixed with oil from other countries there.

The publication notes that against the background of the energy crisis, American regulators turn a blind eye to these facts if the share of mixed Russian oil is less than a quarter. Gasoline and diesel fuel also go after processing Russian oil in India to Western markets.

That is, Russia is already successfully using the very scheme that is in the order of things in Iran and Venezuela. And it even surpasses its “teachers” in many ways, since it only increases oil sales in the face of severe sanctions.

However, analysts believe that the sanctions pressure on Russia will only grow anyway, and a new step in this direction will be secondary sanctions against countries that buy Russian oil, and primarily against India and China.

It is worth adding to this that until 2022 India was not even among the ten largest countries importing Russian oil. The volume of Russian oil exports in 2021 was 230 million tons, and today India purchased 8.5 million tons, even if it does this at the same pace, it will buy a maximum of 30 million tons from Russia in 2022, which will be approximately 13 % of all Russian exports. This figure is unlikely to please the exporter.