Behind India’s massive Russian oil imports: Asia’s richest man
United States President Donald Trump’s additional 25 percent tariff on India for its imports from Russia, saying it is helping fuel Russia’s war in Ukraine, has put the South Asian nation in the highest tier of tariffed nations so far.
While New Delhi and Moscow are old strategic partners with a relationship dating to the Cold War era, and Russia is a major supplier of India’s defence arsenal, Trump’s ire has predominantly been focused on the recent surge in India’s oil imports from its old ally.However, a stagnation of the level of the price cap – it has been at $60 for more than three years now – and a lack of enforcement have blunted its effect, Raghunandan added.
Instead, a shadow fleet – a fleet of hundreds of vessels operated by Russia to evade policing of its exports – has helped ensure that buyers paid higher than the price cap. As recently as January, approximately 83 percent of Russian crude was being transported via these vessels, as per CREA data. In June, that was down to 59 percent.
CREA tracked RIL’s Russian crude oil imports at its Jamnagar refinery and exports, from 2021 to the end of last month, for Al Jazeera.
It found that the Jamnagar refinery has exported $85.9bn of refined products globally from February 2023 till last month. An estimated 42 percent ($36bn) of those exports have gone to countries sanctioning Russia.
A third of their total exports, worth 17 billion euros ($19.7bn), have been to the EU and $6.3bn of oil products to the US, an estimated $2.3bn of which were processed from Russian crude.
The US is the fourth-biggest importer among individual countries, in value terms, from this refinery since the price caps came into effect, topped only by the United Arab Emirates, Australia and Singapore. In volume, the US is the biggest importer from the Jamnagar refinery, having imported 8.4 million tonnes of oil products since the price caps till the end of July 2025.
In 2025, the US imported $1.4bn of oil products from the refinery, a 14 percent year-on-year increase, the third most of any country globally.
US imports from Jamnagar consist mainly of blending components (64 percent), petrol (14 percent) and fuel oils (13 percent).
After RIL, Nayara Energy, which is majority-owned by Russian firms, including Rosneft, the state-owned oil and gas giant, has been a big importer of Russian crude. Its Vadinar refinery, the second-largest private refinery in India after Jamnagar, got, on average, 66 percent of its total crude imports this year from Russia.
