Why the West Pressured India on Russian Oil Without Wanting Supply to Stop
Western capitals have spent the last two years telling their publics that sanctions are choking Russia’s war machine, and that the rest of the world is falling in line. India, the world’s third-largest oil consumer, became a prime stage for this storyline. The pressure on New Delhi to cut Russian crude has been loud, constant, and very performative. Yet the oil market does not run on speeches. It runs on barrels, refinery throughput, freight, and margins. When you follow the numbers instead of the press releases, what emerges is a far more cynical but far more stable arrangement: the US and Europe want India to show visible compliance, not trigger a supply shock. India wants to maintain domestic price stability and refinery economics. Russia wants volumes to keep moving even if discounts widen. Everyone gets something. The public gets a headline.
What the West publicly demanded and what it can realistically enforce
The official Western objective is simple on paper: reduce Russia’s energy revenue. The operational objective is more constrained: do it without sending global crude prices through the roof. That is why the sanctions regime is built around price caps and service restrictions rather than a physical blockade. When enforcement tightens, it targets insurance, shipping services, and entities in the Western financial system. It does not stop oil from moving across open seas.
This is also why the metric of “success” becomes politically convenient: reductions that are visible in headline import data, even when the underlying market adjusts in ways that are harder to communicate. If voters in Europe and the US are told Russian barrels are leaving the system, it sounds like a win. If they are told the barrels are still moving but at a discount, through longer routes, with more opacity, that sounds like policy failure. Optics are easier than nuance.
India’s calibrated response in numbers
India’s Russian crude intake did not vanish. It fluctuated based on sanctions risk, shipping availability, and which refiners were more exposed to Western markets. The most telling figure is the recent dip that Western capitals can point to.
Shipping and trade analytics cited widely in market reporting show India’s December 2025 Urals intake around 929,000 barrels per day, the lowest since December 2022. At the same time, annual averages cited by the same tracking ecosystem put India’s Russian crude imports around 1.36 million barrels per day in 2024 and about 1.27 million barrels per day in 2025. That is not an exit. It is a reduction that can be advertised, especially if the comparison is made to peaks.
The share figures are even more useful for the optics narrative. Market reporting using Kpler-style tracking put Russia’s share of India’s crude imports at about 36 percent in 2024, falling to roughly 33.3 percent in 2025, while OPEC’s share edged up to about 50 percent in 2025 from about 49 percent a year earlier. That lets Western officials say, “Russia is losing share,” while India can say, “We diversified,” and everyone can pretend the story ends there.
But the real check is refinery throughput, because India cannot “optics” its way out of physical demand.
Refinery throughput shows why a full cutoff was never the plan
India’s refineries run hard because India’s demand profile forces them to. A government-linked monthly petroleum reporting line for October 2025 puts total crude processed at 22.5 million metric tonnes for that month. Using a standard industry conversion approximation of about 7.33 barrels per tonne of crude, that is roughly 165 million barrels in the month, or about 5.3 million barrels per day of processing. Even allowing for variation by crude grade, the message is simple: India is processing around five million barrels per day scale. A dip of a few hundred thousand barrels per day of visible Russian supply cannot be absorbed without replacement unless throughput falls, inventories are drawn down, or the “replacement” is not cleanly traceable.
This is where the neat public narrative begins to wobble.
The substitution that is visible, and the gap that is not
Some substitution is documented and visible because it happens via conventional suppliers and clearly identified grades. A recent example is Indian Oil Corporation buying 7 million barrels for March loading from Angola, Brazil, and the UAE to replace Russian barrels. The breakdown reported in trade chatter is quite specific: 1 million barrels of Murban, 2 million barrels of Upper Zakum, 1 million barrels each of Angola’s Hungo and Clove, and 2 million barrels of Brazil’s Buzios. That is a real, traceable diversification move. It is also not remotely large enough, by itself, to replace a sustained shortfall if Russian barrels truly disappeared from India’s system.
There is also the BPCL-Petrobras contract: 12 million barrels for a year at about $780 million for FY2027. That is about 32,900 barrels per day averaged across a year. Useful. Symbolic. Not a replacement for anything on the million-barrel-per-day scale.
So when public data and market trackers show Russian imports dipping sharply at certain points, and the visible substitutes add up only partially, the unavoidable question is not “who is lying,” but “what mechanisms are doing the rest of the work.”
How Russian barrels can keep moving without wearing a Russian label
There are three broad mechanisms that can reconcile the math without making courtroom-level allegations.
One is timing and inventory. Refiners can draw down inventories temporarily, especially if they anticipate cargo delays or compliance disruptions. This can smooth a short-term import dip without immediate throughput collapse.
Second is trader-mediated supply. When a refinery buys from a major national oil company, origin and grade are clearer. When it buys through a chain of traders, cargo documentation often focuses on commercial terms and blend specifications rather than the neat political story of origin. This is not inherently illegal, but it reduces clarity for headline interpretation.
Third is blending and ship-to-ship transfers in global hubs. Blended crude becomes commercially defined by blend characteristics rather than geopolitically defined by a single origin. Once blending becomes common, the statement “Russian imports fell” can be true in a narrow customs classification sense, while the broader reality is that Russian-origin molecules are still embedded somewhere in the supply chain.
This is precisely why Western policymakers can know the broad picture and still sell the simplified version.
Why the US and Europe tolerate the contradiction
Because stopping the barrels is not the priority. Stabilising the market is.
If India, China, and other large buyers stopped absorbing Russian crude, Russia would try to force barrels into fewer outlets, discounts would deepen, logistics would strain, and global prices could spike if the system could not reroute efficiently. In the West, a price spike is not an abstract economic concern. It is electoral suicide. Fuel price inflation hits logistics, food, and voter sentiment fast.
So the West needs a sanctions regime that punishes Russia but does not punish Western consumers more. That is why the system is built to squeeze Russia’s netbacks through discounts, longer routes, higher freight costs, and compliance friction, while still keeping supply on the water.
This is also why the optics matter. Western governments can frame a visible dip in India’s direct Russian purchases as proof of pressure working, even if they understand that the market, by design, finds workarounds that keep the physical supply chain intact.
What Russia actually lost, and what it likely retained
Russia did take a hit where it matters most to a petro-state: price realisation. Recent market reporting around sanctions-driven disruptions showed Urals discounts widening, with discounts cited as high as roughly $12 per barrel below Brent in certain windows. Separately, European policy updates have pushed the price cap lower, with an EU-announced mechanism lowering the cap to $44.10 per barrel effective February 1, 2026. Lower caps and wider discounts mean Russia must accept lower net revenues per barrel, and pay more in logistics and risk premium to keep volumes moving.
But volume loss is the more politically satisfying claim, and the more complicated one to prove in an oil market that reroutes. Even when India trims direct exposure, the same reporting cycle shows Russia redirecting barrels to China, with China’s seaborne Russian imports rising materially as India and Turkey cut back. That does not look like a system that has stopped flows. It looks like a system that has reorganised flows.
So Russia likely lost margin more than it lost market presence. That is still pain, but it is not the knockout blow the slogans imply.
Who benefits, and who stays clueless
India benefits by keeping its refineries fed and domestic fuel prices insulated from sudden supply shocks. It also benefits geopolitically by signalling diversification when needed, without surrendering autonomy.
The West benefits by avoiding the inflationary shock that a real supply removal would cause. It also benefits politically by claiming sanctions are working and pressure is paying off.
Russia benefits by keeping volumes moving, even at a discount, because cash flow matters more than pride in a wartime economy.
And the public, in every geography, gets the least honest part of the arrangement: simplified narratives that are designed for domestic consumption rather than an honest description of how energy markets actually work. If the goal is to understand reality, the scoreboard is not “who reduced what on paper.” The scoreboard is whether barrels kept moving, whether prices stayed tolerable, and whether political leaders got the headlines they wanted. On those metrics, this arrangement looks less like a moral crusade and more like a carefully managed trade-off where everyone got a slice, and the public got theatre.
