NEW DELHI – Russian crude held its position at the top of India’s oil import ledger in August, even as shipments retreated from the record pace of the previous two months. The dip was supply-side, not demand-side: Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refinery infrastructure complicated logistics across the Urals basin, but Indian refiners maintained their sourcing calculus and Russian barrels stayed the first call.
The data, compiled by commodity tracking firms and reported by Business Standard on Wednesday, showed Russia accounting for roughly a third of India’s total crude oil imports in August, slightly lower than the record levels set in June and July but still well ahead of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. India processed approximately 5.1 million barrels per day in August, and Russian crude supplied between 1.7 and 1.8 million of those barrels per day, according to preliminary tanker-tracking data.
What shifted in August was not the preference but the availability. Ukrainian drone attacks have repeatedly targeted oil storage and pipeline infrastructure inside Russia throughout the summer, forcing some cargoes to route through alternate Baltic and Arctic terminals, adding transit time and freight cost to oil that already carries a logistical premium over Middle Eastern barrels. The result was a slight tightening of available Urals and ESPO blend volumes hitting Indian ports, particularly in the second half of the month.
Indian state refiners, including Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum, and Hindustan Petroleum, continued to absorb discounted Russian crude, which was trading at approximately $8 to $10 per barrel below the Brent benchmark on a delivered basis, according to trade sources. Private refiner Reliance Industries, which operates the world’s largest single-location refinery at Jamnagar, Gujarat, continued to blend Russian crude with Middle Eastern and West African grades for export-oriented product runs.
The LPG picture told a different story. US liquefied petroleum gas captured approximately 73 percent of India’s LPG import volume in August, according to data reported by Moneycontrol and ET Now, reflecting a sharp swing driven by disruptions to Middle Eastern supply chains and the economics of US shale-derived LPG exports reaching the subcontinent. Indian households and commercial kitchen users consume roughly 25 million metric tons of LPG annually, the largest such market in the world. The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has been broadening the supplier base for gas precisely because geographic concentration of crude is one risk; geographic concentration of gas is a different and potentially more acute one.
The two trends, Russian crude holding at the top and American gas surging to near-dominance, are not contradictory. They reflect New Delhi’s deliberate energy strategy: buy the cheapest and most available oil regardless of origin, while diversifying gas supply toward suppliers less exposed to regional conflict risk. That Russia and the United States end up on different sides of that equation in August 2026 is a function of market structure, not diplomatic signaling.
American officials have at various points pushed India to reduce its dependence on Russian energy. India’s response, consistently and without drama, has been that it is a sovereign purchaser and that energy security decisions are made on economics. The fact that India simultaneously runs the world’s largest LPG import program, a substantial share of which now goes to American suppliers, complicates any argument that New Delhi is geopolitically aligned against the West on energy.
What Indian refiners do not want is a supply shock that their diversification strategy cannot absorb. If Ukrainian strikes continue to disrupt Russian terminal capacity through the fourth quarter, Indian buyers may be forced to contract additional Middle Eastern or West African volumes at less favorable prices, compressing the refining margins that have been unusually wide this year.
The question the August import data does not answer is whether the volume reduction is temporary or the beginning of a structural decline as Western sanctions progressively erode Russia’s export capacity. India’s India-US nuclear energy cooperation talks in Washington this week underscore that New Delhi is thinking about energy diversification at every level of the fuel stack. The crude import mix of August 2026 is one point in a longer arc of strategic energy realignment that is not moving at anyone else’s pace. India’s public sector banking sector gives New Delhi the fiscal capacity to underwrite energy diversification investments that commercial logic alone might not sustain.
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