India’s largest private refiner, Reliance Industries, is sounding the market for buying Russian crude, an anonymous source told Bloomberg on Friday, after the United States on Thursday issued a temporary one-month license to India allowing it to purchase Russia-origin crude loaded on vessels before or on March 5.
Even before the waiver was issued, India was considering returning to buying Russian crude amassed in floating storage in Asia as the war in Iran and Tehran’s retaliatory strikes in the region have severely disrupted oil flows from the Middle East.
India, the world’s third-largest crude importer, depends on Middle East supply for about 60% of its imports, and the de facto halted tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has put severe pressure on its supplies.
So the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Thursday issued a general license to India for Indian refiners to buy Russian crude loaded on any vessel, including blocked vessels, on or before March 5, 2026, until April 4, 2026.
Currently, as many as 15 million barrels of Russia-origin crude are sitting on tankers close to India – in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal – while another 7 million Russian crude barrels are idling near Singapore, per vessel-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.
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Before the U.S. sanctions on Russia’s top producers Rosneft and Lukoil in October 2025, Reliance Industries of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani was the biggest buyer of Russian crude oil, importing more than 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) thanks to a long-term deal with Rosneft.
However, the Indian refiner halted all Rosneft purchases in the wake of the U.S. sanctions and took to procuring crude from non-Russian sources.
Now Reliance Industries has a one-month window to buy Russian crude that’s on tankers and, most importantly, these tankers are not blocked in the Strait of Hormuz.
The largest private refiner in India plans to use that window to buy part of the Russian oil and process it at a refinery unit producing fuels for the domestic Indian market, according to Bloomberg’s source.
A separate unit processing fuels for exports will continue to use non-Russian crude, as the EU enacted on January 21 a ban on imports into the bloc of petroleum products obtained in third countries that are derived from Russian-origin crude oil.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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