China has boosted imports of Russia’s flagship Urals crude, as refiners buy additional volumes of discounted oil while India is hesitant amid U.S. threats over its purchases of Russian oil.
China is the top buyer of Russian crude, but most of its imports consist of the ESPO grade shipped from Russia’s port of Kozmino in the Far East.
Urals, on the other hand, is being shipped from the ports in western Russia to India, and China hasn’t imported much of the grade due to higher shipping costs and longer voyages.
However, with the hiked U.S. tariffs on India over its imports of Russian crude, trade flows have started to shift, and China and Russia are winning in the new Urals trade, at the expense of India.
So far this month, China is estimated to have imported nearly 75,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Urals crude, according to data by Kpler cited by Bloomberg. The volumes have almost doubled compared to an average of about 40,000 bpd of Urals imports so far this year.
India, for its part, has seen imports of Urals more than halve to around 400,000 bpd so far in August, down from an average of more than 1 million bpd so far in 2025, according to the shipments observed by Kpler.
Some of the Urals not making its way to India could be absorbed by China, but not all, energy flow tracking at Vortexa showed.
“Though some of this surplus could be temporarily re-directed to China, these are stop-gap measures. Importantly, China absorbing all surplus volumes is not entirely a realistic scenario either,” Delia He, a freight analyst at Vortexa, wrote in an analysis last week.
The biggest Indian state-owned refiners are pulling out of spot purchases of Russian crude for cargoes loading in the coming months as the U.S. increases pressure on India for its Russian oil imports.
“India’s dependence on Russian crude is opportunistic and deeply corrosive of the world’s efforts to isolate Putin’s war economy,” the White House trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote in an op-ed published in the Financial Times on Monday.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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