Europeans secretly buy oil from Russia.
A Western base writes that European countries are still secretly buying oil from Russia despite Russia’s threat of sanctions.
News sources say that Russian oil has opened its way to the European market in recent weeks. Threats and rhetoric about sanctions against Russia continue, but the country’s oil shipments are delivered to tankers, and while their destination is declared “unknown”, they enter European oil markets and are secretly traded there.
In April alone, an average of 1.6 million barrels of oil a day left Russia for unknown destinations, according to Fortune, citing tanker trackers tracking tanker movements.
A new report from The Wall Street Journal shows that this trend has recently increased, with more than 11.1 million barrels of oil being delivered to unmanned tankers in April. Prior to the start of the Ukrainian war, the number of such shipments was almost zero.
Although the European Union has not yet formally imposed sanctions on oil imports from Russia, oil traders in Europe themselves have welcomed the possible sanctions. The traders are worried that the purchase of oil from Russia could be seen as government financing, which has been accused of committing “war crimes,” according to Fortune.
But now, six weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cheap Russian oil is more tempting for European oil traders than they can get past.
In response to the question of what the term “unknown destination” means, Fortune writes that offshore oil is shipped to larger vessels and mixed with oil from other sources to make the point of origin unknown.