India buys 18 pc of all Russian crude exports in May, EU biggest buyer since start of Ukraine war: Report

Russian crude oil imports into the EU fell by 18 percent in May, the Central for Research on Energy and Clean Air said in a report on Monday.

However, this reduction was taken up by India and the United Arab Emirates, leading to no net change in Russia's crude oil export volumes, it said.

Among the Indian refiners, who imported Russian crude, Reliance Industries was at the top, importing 27 percent of its needs from there, the Helsinki-based research organisation said.

Though European Union and the US had been pressuring India to not increase the import of Russian oils since the Ukraine War broke out, the EU accounted for 61 percent of fossil fuel exports from Russia, worth nearly 57  billion euros, since the war started.

India has purchased only 3.4 billion euros worth of fossil fuels from Russia.

But the big buyers were China (EUR12.6 bn), Germany (EUR12.1 bn), Italy (EUR7.8 bn), the Netherlands (EUR7.8 bn), Turkey (EUR6.7 bn), Poland (EUR4.4 bn), France (EUR4.3 bn), and Belgium (EUR2.6 bn) being other big buyers, said the report.

The largest Indian buyer is the Jamnagar refinery, which got 27 percent of its oil from Russia in May, up from less than 5 percent before April, CRECA said in its report. But, much of the oil was re-exported from Jamnagar.

"Approximately 20 percent of exported cargoes left for the Suez Canal, indicating that they were heading to Europe or the US. We identified shipments to the United States, France, Italy and the UK," CRECA said.

Every day in May, Moscow lost about 200 million euros per day owing to the reduction in demand and the discounted price of Russian oil.