India plans to continue buying cheap crude oil from Russia, despite sanctions imposed on major Russian oil companies by the United States and Europe.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Russia-India annual bilateral summit in New Delhi last week, during which Putin said: “Russia is ready for uninterrupted shipments of fuel to India.”

India is the second-largest consumer of Russian oil after China and is facing intense pressure from the US to stop buying it. Earlier this year, the administration of US President Donald Trump doubled trade tariffs on Indian goods to 50 percent, in part because of this issue, Trump said at the time.

Here is what we know about India’s imports of Russian oil, and how New Delhi has managed to keep its petroleum purchases from Moscow afloat in spite of sanctions and pressure.

In 2021, prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian oil constituted around 2.5 percent of India’s total oil imports, according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration published in February this year.

After the war began, Europe and the US began placing sanctions on Russian companies to economically isolate Moscow.

Overall, since the beginning of the war, the US and its allies have imposed more than 21,000 sanctions on Russia, targeting individuals, media organisations, the military, and sectors that include energy, aviation, shipbuilding and telecommunications.

Crucially, however, in December 2022, the Group of Seven (G7), the European Union and Australia placed a cap on the price of Russian oil at $60 per barrel, ostensibly to reduce Russia’s ability to fund its war in Ukraine. The cap was later reduced to around $48 by the EU and the United Kingdom. This made Russian oil more attractive to purchasers, particularly India and China. Russia has sold crude oil to India at steeply discounted rates, dropping as low as $35 per barrel in March 2022.

At the end of that month, the US imposed new sanctions on hundreds of Russian individuals and entities. These include Russian shipowners, vessels and traders involved in shipping Russian crude.

In November 2024, India’s crude petroleum imports from Russia dropped to $3.9bn and by December 2024, India was importing even less oil from Russia, worth $3.2bn.

However, in January 2025, Indian imports of Russian oil from Russia bounced back up to $3.6bn. Since then, volumes of imports have fluctuated.

Source: Aljazeera