I do love Facts ...Russia has never been this flush with cash — and it's partly thanks to India, which snapped up a monster amount of Russian crude last year.
Russia's federal revenue soared to a record $320 billion in 2023 — an amount partly attributable to India's huge appetite for cheap Russian oil, according to a new report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air shared withCNN.
The nation bought $37 billion of crude from Russia last year, the report said, around 13 times what it purchased from Russia before the war in Ukraine.
India has been a huge customer of Russian crude since Moscow began its invasion of Ukraine. After being slammed by Western trade restrictions, Moscow has doled out hefty discounts to its allies, like India and China, who have since gobbled up huge amounts of oil from the nation.
The two countries have replaced most of Russia's Western customers, with Russiadiverting nearly all of its oil shipmentsto China and India alone, a top official said last year. In particular,Russia accounted for 35% of India's oil purchases in 2023, according to an analysis from S&P Global.
India, one of the largest oil refiners in the world, is also known to process Russian crude before passing it off to Western nations, which banned Russian crude in late 2022. India likely exported around $1.3 billion of oil products of Russian origin to the US from December 2022 to the end of 2023, the CREA analysis found.
