How is Russia still making money from oil?

Now, what are the main ways that Russia and the Kremlin make money is by exporting lots of oil around the world. That’s been part of their business for a long time and it continues to be part of their business. In fact, if we look at total Russian oil exports outside of Russia, you can see they have come down in terms of the EUR, the amount that’s been earned since the invasion. But now look at the total amount. OK. So this is looking at the weight in tonnes of oil exports and you can see what basically they are more or less the same as they were before. Evaluation. So back in February 2022, and this is a, in one sense a little bit odd, because there were all these sanctions on Russia, the UK, the EU, the US. They say they’re not going to import Russian oil, They’ve improved this price cap. Supposedly Russia shouldn’t be making much money or as much money from it. But actually when you look at the revenues that the Kremlin basically earns from all of this oil. Give you kind of average here, the three month average. Look at that red line, it’s up to the highest level now since May 2022. OK, so Russia is still making lots of money from oil, but how are they doing it? Well? Here’s a clue. OK, let me just show you how. Who was receiving Russian oil before the invasion of Ukraine? The main recipients were the US, the EU and China. Now look at how that’s shifted. OK, so the geography has shifted. These countries are no longer accepting it, but China, India and Turkey are. And what’s happening, therefore, is quite interesting. So oil goes from Russia, it goes to places like India, it gets refined. And then because at that point, the sanctions don’t apply anymore. They’ve been kind of laundered that oil can go to Europe, In fact it can go to the UK. And if you look at Indian oil exports from India to the UK, so before the invasion of Ukraine, they were relatively low. This is various different types of things. So jet fuel, diesel and so on from India. Now look what happens after the invasion, they go up quite sharply. So that is oil coming from India that wasn’t previously coming. And what we do know when we look at the various different refineries it comes from. Is that, look at the red bits. A lot of that oil and the oil products, whether it’s jet fuel, whether it’s diesel that comes to the UK, actually started its life as crude coming from Russia, except that rather than coming directly to the UK, it’s gone via India instead.