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
Free to use anywhere with credit to politypolicy.com
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.