Russia Muscles In On Indian Oil Market At Expense Of European Titans
NDTV
Deprived of many of its traditional European buyers, Moscow is on course to deliver somewhere between 1 million and 1.2 million barrels a day to the world's third-largest oil importer this month
Watch out Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Russia is making huge inroads into the Indian oil market and has quite possibly become the largest supplier to the giant Asian buyer.
Deprived of many of its traditional European buyers, Moscow is on course to deliver somewhere between 1 million and 1.2 million barrels a day to the world's third-largest oil importer this month, according to tanker tracking figures compiled by Bloomberg and two oil analytics firms.
That would place it neck-and-neck with, or a little above, Iraq, and far ahead of Saudi Arabia. The surge in flows will be viewed with unease by Baghdad in particular, since Iraq's oil has increasingly had to discount to compete for market share in Asia.
Refiners in India have been gorging on cheap Russian barrels in a way they never did before the invasion of Ukraine, making it noticeable even to Vladimir Putin, Russia's president.