Russian Oil Exports To India Saw A 22-Fold Jump In 2022, Says Moscow

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, earlier this week, announced that Russian oil supplies to India jumped 22-fold last year.

In the early days of the invasion, India was pressured to denounce Russia and snap all trade and diplomatic ties, as the Europeans were promising.

Better sense prevailed, however, with External Affairs Minister Dr Jaishankar, in his charismatic fashion, reminding the West, time and again, that India would deal with each nation on its terms.

The Russia-Ukraine crisis has added to the inflation woes across the world, complemented, at the worst possible time, by the Covid-zero lockdowns in China and the resulting supply chain crisis.

The slowdown came with the central banks across the world tightening the liquidity taps to curb inflation resulting from the sudden spike in prices of key commodities, especially wheat, corn, barley, sunflower oil, and palm oil crude.

However, what most central banks missed was that the inflation was not because of the demand-side, but the supply-side, and consequently, ushered another set of problems in the banking sector.

Global inflation, driven by high oil prices, also dented Western economies. Between May 2020 to April 2022, consumer price inflation (measured as an annual per cent change in the consumer price index) had gone from 0.1 per cent to 8.3 per cent in the US, 0.5 to 9.0 in the UK, 0.6 to 7.4 in Germany, 0.4 to 4.8 in France, -0.2 to 6.1 in Italy, and collectively, from 0.1 per cent to 7.4 per cent for the entire Eurozone.

The Indian government benefitted from the discount at which the Russian crude was available, steadily increasing its imports from March to May.

India received over 24 million barrels of oil in May 2022, up from 7.2 million barrels in April and merely 3 million barrels in March.

In February 2023, India imported a record-high of 1.6 million barrels of crude oil per day from Russia, which constituted 35 per cent of the nation’s total imports, exceeding the combined share of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

In 2021, the Indian refiners procured less than 1 per cent of their crude from the Russian producers, given the cost-intensive logistics. In the wake of the Ukraine war, all those equations have changed.