The purchases were halted this week, four industry sources told Reuters. They said the country's largest oil company, Indian Oil Corp, which operates 10 of India's 20 refineries with a combined capacity of 60 million tonnes a year, had also refused to buy Russian oil.

Hindustan Petroleum, Bharat Petroleum and Mangalore Refinery Petrochemical have also stopped imports, the sources said. Indian refiners, according to Reuters sources, are trying to replace Russian oil and have started buying raw materials from OPEC countries in the Middle East and West Africa.

However, the largest buyers of Russian oil in India are private refiners Reliance Industries and Nayara Energy, partly owned by Rosneft. The latter was hit by the 18th European sanctions package, which also hit another hundred tankers of the Kremlin's"shadow fleet", bringing the total number of them on the"blacklist" to 444 ships.

Since the start of the war, oil shipments from Russia to India have increased more than 30-fold, partly thanks to discounts that initially reached $14-16 per barrel and have fallen to $2.5-4 in recent months. Indian refineries bought 1.75 million barrels per day from Russia in the first half of 2025, meeting more than a third of their import needs with Russian oil.