Energy & Strategy
By Tushar Gupta · · Source: Monthly trade data; SIPRI via Bloomberg
politypolicy.com · by Tushar Gupta
India, in Infographics

No Russian Oil The Month Of The Invasion. Half The Barrel Fifteen Months Later.

Russia averaged 2.7% of India’s crude before the war, was zero in February 2022, hit 45.9% in May 2023, and was back to 22.2% by January 2026 — where this series ends, and not where the story does. One chart, three windows: eighty-five months of oil, a decade of it, and thirty-four years of the arms relationship underneath.

What To Show
Measure
Series — Click To Add Or Remove
What Happened After This Series Ends

The eighty-five months above stop at January 2026, and read on their own they say the unwind was continuing. It was not. In February 2026 the US–Iran war closed the Strait of Hormuz; Washington issued an India-specific waiver on Russian crude on 5 March; Gulf barrels collapsed — Iraq fell from 1.02 mb/d in January to 0.24 in March and near zero by April — and Russian flows ran the other way. July 2026 reached 2.81 mb/d, 56% of the barrel — past the May 2023 peak marked on the chart.

1.16Jan
1.08Feb
2.08Mar
1.72Apr
2.08May
2.71Jun
2.81Jul
1.88Aug

Russia, million barrels a day. These seven months are not plotted in the chart above because only Russia and the total are available for them, and stacking a partial month would break the one rule the wave keeps: every month’s origins add to its printed total. Source: Kpler, via the charts in Bloomberg, 13 May and 26 August 2026; recovered from the rendered charts.

February 2022
0.00
The month of the invasion — the only zero in eighty-five months
Four Months Later
1.12
June 2022, already 23.5% of every barrel
Peak, May 2023
45.9%
2.15 mb/d — nearly half of everything India imported
Where This Series Ends
22.2%
1.16 mb/d in January 2026, less than half the peak. It did not stay there
Download The Graphic 85 Months Post It How This Was Built ↓
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How This Was Built

Three windows, three provenances, and they are not equally solid.

The monthly oil series is real data. The other two are not the same thing.
The eighty-five-month view comes from a spreadsheet of India’s crude imports by origin, January 2019 to January 2026; every month’s six origins add to its printed total. The decade view and the arms series were both recovered from rendered charts in Bloomberg’s 31 August 2026 explainer by colour-mask pixel extraction — original sources Kpler and SIPRI — and are good to about 0.03 mb/d and half a percentage point respectively.
The two oil windows agree, which is what licenses using either
Where they overlap, 2019 to 2025, the recovered annual figures and the monthly sheet agree on Russia to within 0.01–0.03 mb/d in every year. The build asserts it. But they are not one series: the decade view names Nigeria as an origin where the monthly sheet folds it into “Other”, so the two are never mixed in a single view.
Read the line, not the bars, on arms
Annual arms-transfer shares are dominated by individual deliveries: France reads 47.5% in 2021 and Israel 37.6% in 2023, neither of which describes a trend. The white line is Russia’s trailing five-year mean, the basis SIPRI publishes on, and it is the honest read: 76% in 2007–11 down to 42% in 2021–25. What replaced Russia is not the United States, on 7%, but France on 24% and Israel on 18%.
Volume and share disagree about 2025, and that is why both are on the toggle. Russia’s barrels fell while India’s total imports rose, so its share fell faster than its volume. A reader shown only one gets a different story.

“Other” is every origin not named, and it is where most of the barrels went when Russia fell: between June 2025 and January 2026 Russia dropped 0.94 mb/d while Other rose 1.08, against 0.19 for Iraq and 0.21 for Saudi Arabia. Whether that is new suppliers or a reclassification is not something this data can settle.

Sources. Oil, monthly: Crude Oil Supplier Data, monthly, Jan 2019 to Jan 2026. Oil, annual: India's annual crude imports by origin, 2016-2026, recovered from the chart in Bloomberg's 31 August 2026 explainer; original source Kpler. Arms: SIPRI, via the chart in Bloomberg's 31 August 2026 explainer; shares recovered from the rendered image.
PolityPolicy
by Tushar Gupta · No Rhetoric, Just Data
© 2026 PolityPolicy · by Tushar Gupta · Graphic free to share and reproduce with credit to politypolicy.com. Underlying data belongs to its original compilers.