After President Donald Trump’s much-touted deal with India for a reduction in the punitive tariffs in exchange for India moving oil purchasing from Russia to Venezuela, it wasn’t clear whether or not India substantially changed its purchasing. Russian officials had commented that they had not noticed any changes.
Finally, this week, reports of three recent deals would have India get, in the second half of April, 4 million barrels of crude. Reuters reported from two sources that Reliance, the operator of the world’s biggest refining complex in India, purchased two million barrels. And Energy World reported that India’s state refiners Indian Oil Corp and Hindustan Petroleum Corp have together bought two million barrels of Merey crude from Venezuela for delivery in the second half of April, two trade sources aware of the deal said.
At last count, according to the records of United Nations COMTRADE, Venezuela had sold to India in 2024 less than 150 million barrels of crude monthly—and that was down from its 2013 peak of 1.24 billion barrels monthly. The first three deals under Washington’s takeover of Venezuelan oil apparently represent less than one day of the greatly reduced 2024 level of trade.
Measured in terms of its effect on Russia’s oil trade with India—which averaged last month 1.1 million barrels per day—somewhat less than 4 days’ worth of Russian oil has been displaced, in oil to arrive two months from now.