New Delhi: India was the second-largest buyer of Russian fossil fuels in March 2026, importing EUR 5.8 bn worth of Russian hydrocarbons, CREA said. From Russia, crude accounted for EUR 5.3 bn, or 91 percent of India’s purchases, while coal contributed EUR 337 mn and oil products EUR 178.5 mn. The report said India’s total crude imports fell 4 percent in March, but Russian imports doubled.
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The “biggest shift” was in state-owned refiners, whose Russian purchases jumped 148 percent month-on-month, and were 72 percent higher than in March 2025, CREA said. It added that this was “presumably due to Russian barrels being more available in the spot market,” which it described as their main source of imports. The state-owned New Mangalore and Visakhapatnam refineries had stopped Russian imports at the end of November 2025, but purchases resumed in March 2026. Private refiners also increased buying, but only by 66 percent month-on-month, and remained below the last year’s level.
CREA’s buyer-share chart shows China at 51 percent of Russia’s crude exports since December 5, 2022, with India at 38 percent. The report said that Russia is “heavily reliant on Asian markets to sell its oil,” noting that 90 percent of its total crude exports in the first quarter of 2026 went to China and India. That makes India a structural buyer, not just a spot-market opportunist.
India’s Russian crude import bill more than tripled in value terms in March, rising from EUR 1.4 bn in February to EUR 5.3 bn, while volumes doubled. CREA linked the jump to higher prices, saying the closure of the Strait of Hormuz pushed Urals crude up 67 percent to USD 94.5 per barrel in March, more than double the updated price cap of USD 44.1 per barrel. The report also said the discount on Urals halved to USD 6.4 per barrel below Brent.
The spurt in volumes purcahsed by India also followed the one-month waiver granted by the United States (US) on Russian oil, covering cargoes already at sea and shipments on previously sanctioned vessels. The move was aimed at easing prices that had spiked after the US and Israel waged a war against Iran. The waiver caused state-run oil marketing companies, which had previously paused Russian oil purchases, to resume imports from Moscow.
CREA said 14 shipments of oil products from refineries using Russian crude unloaded at EU ports in March, despite the EU’s ban on imports of oil products made from Russian crude. Four of those shipments came from India. The report said US imports from refineries processing Russian crude came from the Jamnagar refinery in India and the STAR refinery in Turkiye, and that as much as 25 percent of Jamnagar’s feedstock came from Russia in March. It also said refineries in India, Turkiye, Brunei and Georgia exported EUR 830 mn of oil products to sanctioning countries in March, up 23 percent month-on-month.
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For Russia, March was a strong month: fossil-fuel export revenues rose 52 percent month-on-month to EUR 713 mn per day, while crude export revenues rose 94 percent to EUR 431 mn per day. Seaborne crude revenues jumped 115 percent, and CREA said almost half of Russia’s seaborne oil was carried by sanctioned shadow tankers. The report’s broader message is that demand from buyers such as India remains enough to keep Russian crude flowing, even as sanctions and attacks on export infrastructure add pressure.