Jaishankar is right about India's choice of Russian oil cooling global inflation
insurance companies would support Russian oil exports only if the export price was at or below $60 a barrel. The US stopped importing Russian oil altogether. According to Brugel, a Brussels-based European think tank, the EU used to account for nearly two-fifths of Russian oil exports, even as Russia accounted for 13% of global oil exports in 2021, the year before the war.
China accounted for another 30% of Russian oil exports. Seaborne oil exports from Russia to the EU amounted for 29% of Russian oil exports, or 75.6 million tonne, which is what the EU has majorly cut back on. A tonne of oil is 7.33 barrels of oil.
India has imported 1.76 million barrels a day on average from Russia over April-September this year, according to a Reuters report. This amounts to an annual rate of 87.6 million tonne, half of that being additional to what India imported in 2021. Clearly, India has been instrumental, via its additional imports from Russia, in neutralizing the reduction in availability of crude that a total ban on Russian seaborne crude by the EU would have created.
When Europe stopped buying seaborne oil from Russia, it turned to other sources of oil, chiefly Opec and the US. Now, if India, which has traditionally sourced its oil mostly from OPEC countries, had continued with its imports of oil from these countries, it would have competed with Europe for the same oil, pushing up prices. India gracefully switched a large portion of its demand to Russia, making the oil it used to source from OPEC available for Europe to buy.
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